Director Ryu Murakami is a Japanese novelist who has been heaped with critical acclaim for his tales of decadent, disaffected youth. He wrote the book on which Audition is based, and there are strong similarities between Miike’s film and Tokyo Decadence, from a needle fixation to structural peculiarities and worldview.

Ai – a quiet, disturbed young girl, like Audition’s Asami – is a prostitute specialising in submission. As she trawls her bulging red bag of kit round an assortment of often drugged up clients –a tycoon with a penthouse, a crackhead with a strangulation fetish, a necrophiliac, a fawning businessman called Turtlehead – she is variously humiliated, turned on, confused and freaked out. But her love for her ex endures.

And that, essentially, is it, story-wise. The film’s progress is tied to Ai’s psychological collapse but, again as in Audition, Murakami seems fascinated with the craziness but uninterested in its causes or plausibility. In another similarity, the two films both derive much of their power from unusual pacing, Audition calm and restrained throughout but then exploding into violence at the end, Tokyo Decadence a frantic pursuit of kicks which empties out, ultimately, as Ai unravels.

Whether or not you believe in Ai’s motivation will largely determine whether you see the film as psychological drama conveyed through sex, or great-looking, imaginative porn with wit, intelligence and a quality score. Yet this distinction is, essentially, irrelevant; more importantly, Tokyo Decadence is an utterly compulsive expression of obsession and madness.