One of the most depressing sex films to come out of Japan or anywhere else—and it’s no wonder. The director is novelist Ryu Murakami, whose great and harrowing Coin Locker Babies (a book I discovered about five years ago while snooping the Haruki Murakami section at a bookstore) is the literary equivalent to your first fisting. It’s funny and a whole lot of ugly at the same time. In the novel, Murakami dreams of Japan’s destruction through nihilistic violence. In this grimy, low-budget movie—adapted from his novel, Topaz—he’s still destroying Japan, but with mostly sexual degradation this time. The story concerns a Tokyo call girl who services the freaks of the emotionless city. She smacks the masochists and gets smacked by the sadists. At best, she’s melancholy; at worst, she’s frightened (either for her safety or for the safety of a pain-loving trick). Amid all of the bondage and choking, she’s still broken up over a past relationship that went wrong. She eventually makes an incompetent, drugged-out move toward redemption, though there doesn’t seem to be much room for that sort of thing in Murakami’s cold, empty Tokyo. It’s not fun and it’s not sexy, but the oddball humor sometimes saves it. The best way to see this movie: At an arthouse theater next door to a Suicide Prevention counselor’s office.