Takashi Miike’s Gozu Is Finally Getting the 4K UHD Treatment

Takashi Miike’s 2003 surreal yakuza horror Gozu is finally getting the physical-media upgrade fans have been waiting for, with both New Wave Video and Radiance Films bringing the cult Japanese nightmare to disc using a brand-new 4K restoration.

The restoration has already had its world premiere at the 2026 Fantasia International Film Festival, where it was presented on 2 August as the world premiere of New Wave Video’s new 4K restoration, courtesy of Radiance Films.

New Wave Video have also restored Gozu in 4K from the only surviving 35mm Cannes print, with the restoration carried out at its facility in Sydney, Australia, and for a film that has spent much of its life trapped on ageing standard-definition releases, that’s pretty fucking significant.

The Yakuza Nightmare Returns

For anyone who hasn’t experienced Gozu, the basic premise sounds almost disappointingly straightforward – low-ranking yakuza Minami, played by Hideki Sone, is ordered to take his increasingly unhinged superior Ozaki, played by Shō Aikawa, somewhere and kill him.

There is, however, a slight problem – Ozaki manages to die accidentally before Minami can actually murder him, and Minami is then left with the rather awkward responsibility of delivering the body to his bosses, except when he arrives at his destination, the corpse has mysteriously disappeared.

And this is where the film stops being anything resembling a normal yakuza movie, because Minami’s search takes him into an increasingly bizarre world of strange characters, grotesque imagery, sexual weirdness, supernatural suggestions and a mysterious woman who seems to be connected to the whole nightmare.

Eventually, whatever expectations you had about where the film was going can be thrown straight out of the window.

Because this is Miike.

Gozu is one of those films where even calling it “horror” doesn’t quite capture what you’re watching – it starts with the familiar territory of Miike’s yakuza cinema before slowly mutating into something much stranger – part supernatural horror, part black comedy, part body horror and part surrealist nightmare.

There are obvious echoes of David Lynch here, and then there are the images, as you don’t forget Gozu very easily.

A Long-Awaited 4K Restoration

New Wave Video has said that getting the rights to Gozu took more than a year of negotiations, before finally securing the opportunity to restore the film from the surviving 35mm Cannes print, and the label is releasing its version on 4K UHD, with the film becoming the company’s first Deluxe Rigid Box release.

Radiance Films is also releasing the film, with its involvement extending to the restoration and physical-media rollout, with both labels are releasing Gozu this year and both are using the same new 4K restoration.

The UK Asian Cinema Home Video Schedule currently lists Gozu under Radiance Films, although that particular schedule currently labels the UK edition as Blu-ray rather than UHD.

Gozu had its international breakthrough at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival, and more than two decades later that surviving print has effectively become the key to giving the film a new life in the physical-media era, and considering how grimy, murky and deliberately unpleasant Gozu can look, the difference could be substantial.

Miike’s film is full of dark interiors, strange colours, grotesque make-up and deliberately uncomfortable imagery, and i’s exactly the sort of movie where a proper restoration can make a much bigger difference than simply slapping a “remastered” sticker on the packaging.

Also, by the time Gozu arrived in 2003, Miike had already established himself as one of Japan’s most unpredictable filmmakers – he had made Audition, Dead or Alive, Visitor Q and Ichi the Killer, among a frankly ridiculous number of other films, and Gozu feels like the point where several sides of his cinema collide.

The Asia Extreme Generation Is Going to Want This

For fans who discovered Japanese horror during the old Asia Extreme DVD boom, Gozu is also a particularly welcome restoration, as l lot of those early-2000s releases have disappeared, become expensive second-hand curiosities or simply look their age.

That means people who first encountered Miike’s surreal yakuza nightmare on an ancient DVD can finally see what it looks like when somebody actually goes back to the surviving film element and gives it the treatment it deserves, and for anyone discovering it for the first time, there is arguably no better excuse to jump in.

Frankly, it probably couldn’t happen to a more fucked-up film.

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About The Author

I am a fan of movies in general and watch quite a few every week, but my love for Asian horror started in the 90’s during the J-horror boom – you know the ones – and ever since then I’ve been hooked on discovering horror from across Asia, from the classics everyone knows to the hidden gems that deserve a much bigger audience.

On this site I explore Asian horror movies from across Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Taiwan, Cambodia, Malaysia, and beyond, since the big entertainment sites tend to focus only on the biggest releases.