The thing I keep coming back to is the well-publicized fourth-wall breaking scene where the aspect ratio changes and Adam Driver looks downward & screen-left so he can have an eye line with a real-life person in the theater who’s meant to ask him a challenging question, which is expressing as literally as possible the idea of a work “Being in a dialogue with the audience”. But this is within the context of a film that has almost no interest in conventional dramatic storytelling, which is meant to be densely allusive, oblique, poetic, etc. To be challenged by it you have to completely buy into it, when a lot of it is within a mode of cinematic expression that’s only comfortably explicable to someone who’s watched Ballet Mécanique a dozen times. He had to have known he was making a movie for five people.
s/o to the sb tokusatsu thread because every time a character referred to ‘megalon’ i could only think of the kaiju
