Incomplete Chairs (2025)
Directed by Kenichi Ugana
Starring Akito Fujii, Ryu Ichinose, & Ryôka Ôshima.

Horror

★★★1/2 (out of ★★★★★)

DISCLAIMER:
The following essay contains
MINOR SPOILERS.

At Brooklyn Horror Film Festival 2025, Kenichi Ugana’s latest film Incomplete Chairs took the cake for strangest, most twisted horror premise: a disturbed chairmaker, Mr. Kujo, is killing people to find the best materials for his masterpiece chair. Incomplete Chairs is a dark, nasty work of satire. Kujo’s trajectory throughout the film is nothing more than pain and misery. Behind all the gruesomeness is a Marxist ideology that drives Kujo, even if the way he expresses his ideology is in blood. Ugana’s film isn’t perfect, but its social satire is a blade in the bourgeois gut. Ugana takes aim at commodity fetishism in a delightfully horrific way. Incomplete Chairs is a serious film, even when hilariously satirical. It’s a brutally efficient story about the ghastly endgame of materialistic obsession, and how capitalism can terrorise the individual past sanity’s breaking point.Incomplete Chairs subverts commodity fetishism into something macabre by having Kujo transform the human body into furniture: you WILL see the labour behind the commodity’s creation, you WILL have no choice but to witness the labour in all its grisly glory. When a woman called Ms. Kato talks with Kujo about his philosophy concerning chairmaking, he explains that “the value attached to [a chair] can lead to indiscriminate branding,” which feels like it’s been taken directly out of the writings of Karl Marx and/or Friedrich Engels. Kujo expands upon his Marxist chairmaking ideology when he says he wants “to continue making chairs that are accessible to everyone. Chairs only the bourgeoisie sit on are pointless.” A hatred of commodity fetishism is enunciated by Ugana when Kujo has a chair of his added to a collection. He takes offence with the collector’s process, as the latter doesn’t seem to care about the artist, nor the artist’s ethos, only the art. He doesn’t like that the man doesn’t care about “the character of the creator.” And when Kujo doesn’t like something, look out.

“By raising the price, the branding goes beyond the reach of the common people.
This helps the bourgeoisie demonstrate their own identity.”

Incomplete Chairs can be read as being about the violent vengeance unleashed after people are isolated too far from the products of labour and everyday objects are turned into commodities that symbolise nothing except societal status. When Kujo’s killing spree is beginning to be discovered, one man remarks: “If he’s allowed to run loose, it’ll be a huge blow to the chair industry.” The film depicts how far commodity fetishism has pushed us as a global society: Kujo murders people and uses their bodies to create a chair, deconstructing the human body into nothing but raw materials, though that’s because people like man who utters the aforementioned quote have debased the human body so far that industry and material objects are considered with more importance and reverence than the victims of a serial killer. Incomplete Chairs is equal parts disturbing, gross, smart, and hilarious in its portrayal of how everything from furniture to our bodies has been twisted into a symbol to prop up the idea that money is the only measure of what matters in life.