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You’d be forgiven for thinking that Survive Style 5+ is just another J-Horror knockoff, riding the coattails of Takashi Miike and Ichi the Killer. I mean, right in the first scene, you’ve got Tadanobu Asano — better known as Kakihara in Ichi — as a sullen killer, trying to bury his wife. You also may think, early on, with all the hitmen and petty thieves in the film, the splasy, stylish titles and the killer soundtrack, that Survive Style 5+ might be taking on Tarantino’s style and slipstreaming it into Japanese film.

But you’re pretty likely to be shocked and surprised when you realize that the primary influence isn’t really Miike, and probably isn’t Tarantino — Survive Style 5+ owes more to the candy-colored set design and surreal scenarios of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse than the grittier world of independent cinema. It’s just as much fun as you’d imagine.

The first and only feature film by commercial director Gen Sekiguchi and writer Taku Tada, Survive Style 5+ plays like the film of someone who has only one shot at cramming all of the ideas they’ve ever had in their life into a single 2 hour feature. The 5+ of the title refers to the 5 groups of characters (and a few extras) that the film follows — a hitman and his undead wife, a pseudo-philosophical outsourced hitman and his sycophantic outsourcer, a hypnotist and his ad-agency wife, a trio of young burglars, and a conventional nuclear family. Everyone’s lives coverge, à la Short Cuts, in strange and unexpected ways.

The real star of the show is the set design. Sekiguchi stuffs every frame full of brightly colored… stuff. The movie is exquisitely cluttered with small, gaudy, colorful elements that converge into sensory overload, all linked in some way with the characters. Many a movie has featured a fantastic set or two, but rarely does a film set in the modern world jump from fantastic environment to fantastic environment as quickly as Survive Style 5+. The filmmakers don’t provide just one or two big set pieces, but have upended the entire world into something a bit brighter, a tad more colorful, and wholly and weirdly artificial.

Thankfully, the script isn’t a drag. None of the characters or scenarios are particularly deep, but they don’t really need to be — as the film keeps lurching in new and unexpected directions, it can get away with a few jokes, a few sight gags, a handful of eccentricities, and an interesting way of grouping thematic elements. The film is also punctuated by fake advertisements created by one of the characters, and when the film starts to lag, those provide a burst of inscrutable humor.

The highlight of the film is the frequent supernatural fight scenes between Asano and his wife. Those manage to be exciting, funny, stylish, and curiously tender at the same time. A common slam against new directors is that they’re only good for music videos or commercials; at least here, Sekiguchi is able to bring out those particular elements that make Japanese commercials so entertaining and still string together a compelling, fun, narrative film. It’s a pity there hasn’t been a follow-up.