A sometime manga artist, Ishii entered the film industry as a writer, scripting Roman Porno at Nikkatsu for such directors as Chūsei Sone, Noboru Tanaka, Shun Nakahara, and Shinji Sōmai. Many of his scripts were based on his own manga Angel Guts(Tenshi no harawata), which Nikkatsu adapted into a series, Ishii making his own directorial debut with one of the later installments. These stories all featured a woman named Nami and a man named Muraki, an authorial quirk still present in much of Ishii’s later work. He obtained good notices for his second film as director, Original Sin (Shinde mo ii, 1992), a grimly engrossing film noir with effectively crafted suspense sequences and some intelligent psychological insights, albeit marred by the distasteful genre staple of a heroine who falls in love with her rapist.
Ishii’s subsequent films have generally unfolded as a variation on a theme, focusing on women in extreme situations. Alone in the Night (Yoru ga mata kuru, 1994) was another neo-noir thriller about a bereaved wife seeking revenge on the yakuza who raped her and killed her cop husband; its climax displayed the director’s characteristic aestheticized violence. A Night in Nude (Nūdo no yoru, 1993) blended this brutality with very black comedy as the heroine, having murdered her violent gangster lover, tricks her agent into disposing of the body. In Freeze Me (Furīzu mī, 2000), about a rape victim who avenges herself on the three perpetrators, the director’s treatment of his themes descended into self-parody. The tortured sexual politics of these films seem even more discomforting when one takes into account Ishii’s admission that he had based the character of Nami on his wife.
The exception to these exercises in putting women and the audience through it was the male-centered, fatalistic heist movie Gonin (1995). Stylistically this was Ishii’s most flamboyant work, with shifting patterns of light and shade visually suggesting the instability not only of the criminal lifestyle, but also of mainstream existence in an insecure post-bubble Japan. It was perhaps Ishii’s most powerful and least distasteful film. However, its sequel, in which the five men of the title were replaced by five women, was poorly received.
Ishii is a technically skilled filmmaker: his staging of scenes of violence, often in long takes, rises at times to an excruciating intensity. His direction of actors is also generally good, and has sometimes been startling: witness the novel way in which the star persona of comedian Naoto Takenaka was adapted to the thriller genre in Gonin and ANightinNude. However, there is a contradiction between the grim intensity of Ishii’s narratives and the self-conscious elements of homage and parody: OriginalSin was a deliberate reworking of ThePostmanAlwaysRingsTwice, while pastiches of the shower murder scene from Psycho (1960, Alfred Hitchcock) occur in OriginalSin, Gonin, ANightinNude, and FreezeMe. This contradiction tends to unbalance his films, and makes their cruelties seem more exploitative than they might otherwise. Latterly, Ishii has returned to his roots in Roman Porno, realizing the two FlowerandSnake (Hanatohebi, 2004 and 2005) films, adapted from Oniroku Dan’s sexually explicit, sado-masochistic novel, and TheBrutalHopelessnessofLove (Hitogahitooaisurukotonodōshiyōmonasa, 2007), a softcore study of an actress who begins to prostitute herself in response to her husband’s philandering.

(Source: A Critical Handbook of Japanese Film Directors) Edit Biography