Sion Sono’s Brutal Game Tag Riaru Onigokko Explained

Hey there everyone! Welcome back to Movie Soapbox, the little corner of the internet that only you and I and that guy in the back row who hasn’t blinked in forty minutes know about. This is the place where we find the films that slipped through the cracks, got buried under a Marvel release date, or arrived from the other side of the world with no marketing budget and a title that confused streaming algorithms into oblivion, and we make sense of them. Today? We are doing a deep dive on Tag, also known as Riaru Onigokko, a 2015 Sion Sono film so deliberately, gleefully unhinged that it reads like a morality play written in fake blood, staged on a game show set, and greenlit by someone who was not paying close attention to what they were actually approving.

This is possibly one of the craziest, bloodiest films I’ve ever seen… and it has definitely earned its reputation… if you haven’t seen it… consider something different? Or watch this trailer and decide for yourself.

Right. If you have not seen this film and you keep reading, I am not responsible for what happens to your ability to enjoy surprises. Everything past this point is spoilers, full stop, the whole map laid out on the table. You have been warned in the only way that matters, which is directly, without ceremony, and without a cutesy graphic of a cartoon bomb or whatever.

How Did the Movie Tag Ever Get Made?

So. Tag. What you need to understand before we walk through a single frame of this film is the kind of director Sion Sono is, and more specifically the kind of film this “should” have been if it had traveled through the standard international distribution pipeline for a mid-budget Japanese genre picture. A film with this premise, this much visible gore, and this much thematic ambition about gender and objectification would have had a very predictable fate in most hands: the allegory gets sanded down in favor of the spectacle, the third act gets a note saying “audiences won’t follow the metaphysical pivot” and the whole thing collapses into a competent but toothless action vehicle that forgets what it was angry about by the time the credits roll. You can see the ghost of that version of this movie if you squint. The fact that Sono got to make the version where the metaphysics ARE the point, where the allegory IS the plot, where the film earns the right to be weird by being completely committed to what it is trying to say, that is not a given. That is a director with enough of a reputation and enough of a cult to drag a movie through intact. Most films with this level of structural audacity do not make it out looking like themselves. This one did.

Tag Movie Walkthrough Top to Bottom

Now let’s walk through what actually happens. The film moves in three acts that rhyme with each other deliberately, each one a variation on the same terrible theme. Mitsuko is on a school bus. She drops her pen, bends down to pick it up, and a wind, an invisible, enormous, bladed wind, slices the bus in half around her. Every other girl on the bus dies. Mitsuko survives. She runs. She finds friends. The world around her, vivid and sunlit and slightly too bright to be real, keeps trying to kill her, and she keeps surviving by the thinnest possible margin.

Then Mitsuko becomes Keiko. Same soul, new body, new scenario: a wedding day. The bridesmaids and the female guests flip, mid-ceremony, into murderous violence. Keiko survives by running. Same pattern, new level.

Then Keiko becomes Izumi. Same soul again, now a running prodigy in the middle of a race. Her friends encourage her, remind her of her speed, and then assassins appear, because of course they do, because this is what the third level of this game looks like. Izumi fights and runs her way through.

The film does not hide what it is doing. The sunlight is too perfect. The blood is too theatrical. The deaths are too elaborate and too immediate, the kind of kills that read as designed rather than accidental, because they are. Every level ends in a massacre. Every level is survived by one girl, in one body, with one through-line of identity that the narrative keeps insisting matters even as the game keeps resetting around her. The film is telling you, early and often, that someone made these rules. Someone chose these scenarios. Someone is watching and enjoying the watching.

When Izumi finally breaks through, she lands in what the film calls “Man’s World,” and it is exactly as on-the-nose as that sounds: a future populated entirely by men, loud and physical and oblivious, where the game called Tag is a celebrated 3D virtual reality experience and Mitsuko/Keiko/Izumi is on the poster for it. She finds an old man who explains that he stole her DNA 150 years ago when she died, recreated her and her friends in digital form, and has been running them through escalating scenarios for his own gratification. The scenario he has been building toward, the final level, is her submission to him.

She does not comply. She attacks. And then, remembering that she was told the only way to break fate is with an act so surprising it catches fate off guard, she kills herself. And then kills herself again, retroactively, in each of the previous scenarios, in the bus, at the chapel, at the race, pulling the plug on every level at once, taking from the player the one thing he has been playing for all along.

Tag Movie Theories to Explain That Insanity

Theory #1 to Explain the Movie Tag – The dominant read, and the one the film essentially announces out loud, is the feminist allegory: women reduced to avatars in a game designed and controlled by men, their pain and survival and death all existing for male entertainment, and the act of radical self-determination, even a fatal one, as the only move that cannot be anticipated or monetized. Sono made this film in the same period as several other works that engage directly with gender violence and exploitation in Japanese culture, and this one is the least subtle of them. It does not whisper the allegory. It walks it out onto the floor and introduces it to everyone in the room.

Theory #2 to Explain the Movie Tag – The second read, which works alongside the first rather than against it, is the film as a critique of video game culture specifically, the way female characters function in games as objects of player desire and player violence, and the question the film has the audacity to actually ask: is a movie that objectifies its female characters in order to comment on the objectification of female characters actually doing something different, or is it just a more prestigious version of the same transaction? The film raises this question and does not fully resolve it. Some people find that intellectually cowardly. Some people find it honest.

Theory #3 to Explain the Movie Tag – A third thread, less commented on but present, reads the film through the lens of the Yuri tradition in Japanese media, a genre centered on relationships between women, and identifies the bonds between Mitsuko and her various female companions across the three acts as the emotional core the game cannot simulate or control. The player can script the violence. He cannot script the loyalty.

The Moviesoapbox Read of the Movie Tag

My read is the second one with the first one underneath it, and I am going to stay there without hedging. The film is most interesting precisely in the moment it makes you uncomfortable with its own methods. Sono is not naive enough to think he has escaped the trap he is describing. The film’s campiness, the squirting blood, the absurdist brutality, is the point: it is keeping you at a distance from the violence while also making sure you feel the sheer volume of it. You laugh, and then you register that you laughed at a bus full of schoolgirls being bisected, and then you have a brief uncomfortable moment about that, and that moment is the film working exactly as intended. Discomfort is the product. The silliness is the delivery mechanism.

Sion Sono made a film that is genuinely funny and genuinely furious at the same time. Those two things should not coexist as well as they do here. The fact that they do is a directorial achievement that most films with this much anger in them never manage, because most films with this much anger in them get notes telling them to pick one.