Thursday, April 27, 2006
beware the girl with long black hair
Been catching up on some of my J-horror over the last few weeks, and I have learned that you could do worse than heed the above advice (which, having just watched Silent Hill, applies there as well).
Marebito is the new film by Takashi Shimizu, the sort-of auteur by way of Roger Corman responsible for the Ju-On movies. I actually like the two Japanese Ju-On theatrical films; they don't make a hell of a lot of sense as traditional narrative, but they work as viscerally effective spook house rides where something drops from the ceiling every five minutes to freak you out. In some ways Marebito is a shift for Shimizu -- fewer, if any, of those jump out of your seat moments -- but he still favors atmosphere over narrative, in this case an overwhelming atmosphere of creeping dread.
Masuoka is a freelance cameraman obsessed with seeing the world through his camera. One day he catches a man on tape in the Tokyo subway who commits suicide by plunging a knife into his eye and Masuoka promptly decides "that look of terror...a thing so awful that he would rather kill himself...I must see what he saw," pretty much sealing his fate. From that point forward I was comfortable in the knowledge that rather than the nail-biting tension that comes from wondering if the protagonist will survive their bout with the forces of darkness, this schmuck was going to get everything that was coming to him. So he retraces the steps of the man in the video, descending deeper and deeper into the underground beneath Tokyo, eventually wandering a surreal landscape of tunnels that connect all the major cities of the world (shades of Eco's Focault's Pendulum) until finding himself in Lovecraft's proverbial Mountains of Madness. There he stumbles upon a beautiful, naked girl -- with strangely sharp teeth and long black hair -- chained in a cave. And, of course, he takes her home.
Like I said, this guy gets everything he deserves.
The remainder of the film concerns Masuoka's bizarre attachment to the girl he's discovered: maybe she's a monster, maybe she's Masuoka's own daughter (a woman who says she's his ex-wife confronts him with the claim that their daughter has disappeared), maybe she's not there at all. As is typical with a lot of J-horror, it's never really clear, but it's still worth a watch for the atmosphere Shimizu creates. In particular, Masuoka's descent into the underworld is quite well done, with lots of Orphic imagery, strange Phillip K. Dickian asides, and the explicit evocation of Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos. Also of note is that the film was shot in a week on digital video for a miniscule sum of money, so it's interesting to see what can be accomplished without much time or cash.
Three...Extremes is a much ritzier affair, a horror anthology featuring the work of Takashi Miike, Chan-Wook Park, and Fruit Chan, three of the hottest Asian directors working right now. Miike's contribution is so oblique as to be almost impenetrable, but it's beautifully filmed. Chan-Wook Park's episode about an elaborate revenge scheme is more successful, though Park -- director of Oldboy, part of the so-called Vengeance Trilogy -- has gone to that well more than a few times, but it's notable for some absolutely amazing art direction.
The most successful of the three shorts -- at least in terms of horror -- is Fruit Chan's, a piece titled simply and ominously, "Dumplings." What's interesting about "Dumplings" is that the horror isn't derived from gore or shock, but from pursuing an almost unthinkable concept to its logical conclusion. There are scenes of a woman simply eating a dumpling that caused me to squirm in my seat solely because of the sound-effects. Not that it's hard to figure out, but I won't ruin the conceit here; suffice to say that it also makes some cogent points about modern Chinese society and its views on both women and children. There's a fair amount going on here, and the version presented in "Three...Extremes" is actually a shortened cut of a theatrical film (which I haven't seen), also included on the R1 DVD release. Very much worth a look for any student of horror, but not for the faint of heart.
The last film in the cavalcade is probably also the best, a Thai horror film (T-horror?) titled Shutter that lifts heavily from both Ju-On and Ring , and yet in the end manages to overcome any comparisons with those movies through some novel plot twists and a haunting, subtly ironic ending. Tun is a young photographer with a cute girlfriend, but on the way home from a wedding party, Tun's girlfriend hits a young girl (yes, with long black hair) who wanders into the road. Tun urges her to leave before someone sees them, so away they drive and in flies the ghost.
Except...well, let me put it this way: writer/director Banjong Pisanthanakun knows the audience has seen Ju-On and Ring, and he uses their expectations against them. Every time you think you've got a bead on where the plot is heading, new information is revealed that causes you to question everything that's come before. It's a surprising movie in that it starts with what seems like a completely obvious set-up, then becomes progressively more clever over time ( Wild Things is one of the few other films I can think of in this regard).
The horror is definitely of the Ju-On shock variety, but effectively done and there are more than a few sequences that are hard to shake. One of the real stand-out stars of the film, though, is a really slick soundtrack that pays nice homage to the work of Bernard Hermann.
So what have we learned? Three important lessons:
- Do not unchain the girl from the cave in the Mountains of Madness. They are called the Mountains of Madness for a reason.
- If Bai Ling offers you dumplings, think twice. And not just because it's Bai Ling.
- If you run over a girl with long black hair, stop, offer assistance, and call 911. It'll be better for everyone.
Who says you never learn anything at the movies?