The Inerasable (2015)

Original title: 残穢 -住んではいけない部屋- Zan'e: Sunde wa ikenai heya

Mystery novel writer Ai (Yuko Takeuchi) earns her daily bread by turning true ghost stories her readers send her into a series of newspaper tales. When an architecture student we’ll call Ms. Kubo (Ai Hashimoto) sends her a story about the curious swishing noise of heavy fabric on tatami mats she hears coming from the bedroom of the small apartment she has just moved into, Ai becomes instantly fascinated. Ms. Kubo’s first thought of the noise being the sound of somebody sweeping the floor takes on a more sinister quality soon enough, suggesting the dragging back and forth of a loose kimono sash worn by a hanged woman. Trying to explain what is going on, she makes various inquiries, learning that, even though nobody killed themselves in her apartment as she has begun to assume, the former tenant did kill himself after he moved out. Stranger still, the apartment building has an uncomfortably high turnaround rate in tenants. More research uncovers hers isn’t the only apartment in which strange things happen.

Ai and Ms. Kubo continue the research, increasingly teaming up in person, where they only talked via email before, discovering one terrible and disquieting thing after the next.

Yoshihiro Nakamura’s The Inerasable is a wonderful film, telling its tale of a series of interconnected hauntings, or the tales about these hauntings in the calmest and most gentle of voices which belies the actual horror lurking behind them. Nakamura, as the director of the wonderful Fish Story, has more than just a bit of experience with shaggy dog tale structures, and uses his considerable control about this format here wonderfully. Unlike in Fish Story, the shaggy dog here is more of a shaggy abyss, of course.

One of the film’s great strengths is its ability to create a sense of place and of community, digging backwards into the lives and times of a specific building lot, implying the mores and characters of the people populating it over time with just the right, short, strokes, while at the same time creating lively characters out of our two heroines, their increasing entourage of helpers, and all the people that tell them their stories, or more often the stories they heard from others, in the process. On this level the film not only tells creepy stories but also explores how communities create stories out of their lives. Nakamura does all this with a very impressive eye for the telling detail that brings a character to life, putting the rest in the hands of a capable cast of Japanese character actors of all generations.

As a shock-delivering device, The Inerasable isn’t terribly great. The handful of direct horror sequences suffer a bit from Nakamura’s insistence on some rather bad looking CGI effects, and sound design that’s – apart from the really creepy swishing – too generic to be effective. However, the actual manifestation of the supernatural isn’t really where the film’s terror lies. Rather, this core lies in the way every ghost story its two main protagonists uncover is in fact just the result of another, even more terrible one, that itself covers a different one and grows tendrils of other just as terrible stories. If you’re just looking long and hard enough, and peel off enough layers, the film suggests, every place is haunted, and all hauntings seem to be connected to something terrible in the end. Which does of course fit nicely into the Japanese style curse the film concerns itself which tend to operate like a supernatural or spiritual virus. Unlike me, Nakamura and his film suggest all this in a gentle thoughtful tone, probably offering you tea next; it’s quite wonderful, reminding me not so much directly of M.R. James but of the mild, ironic tone James framed his ghost stories with so often.


So, if you like your ghost stories gentle but not at all harmless, told with a deep feeling for the humanity of all characters you encounter but not looking away from terrible implications (even when the characters try), this one’s for you.

Creepy (2016)

Original title: クリーピー 偽りの隣人

Warning: there will be copious spoilers!

Some time ago, Koichi Takakura (Hidetoshi Nishijima) was one of the few Japanese police investigators well versed in American profiling techniques. After an incident that resulted in the death of several people and grievous injury to himself, Koichi retired from the force, and now works as a university lecturer on criminal psychology. His wife Yasuko (Yuko Takeuchi) and he have just moved into a new house in easier reach for his new job. And, one suspects, also to draw a hard line between the past and the present. The marriage certainly isn’t in the best state, either, both partners performing the roles of a loving couple more than actually living them.

Soon, though, Koichi finds himself falling back into old habits he promised Yasuko to change, poking around a cold case involving the disappearance of three members of a single family who left behind their daughter Saki (Haruna Kawaguchi). Saki’s vague statements concerning the case never made much sense to anyone involved in the investigation, and when a former colleague and friend of Koichi hears of his interest in the case, he asks him to interview the now nearly grown up girl. What he hears from her suggests a very particular and strange kind of serial killer.

At the same time, Yasuko has repeated and increasingly disturbing encounters with one of their neighbours, Mr. Nishino (Teruyuki Kagawa). Something is very off about that man as well as his family, and he seems to develop some kind of hold over her.

Of all the directors who came to a degree of international fame during the great J-horror boom, Creepy’s Kiyoshi Kurosawa has been the one whose films have been the most consistent in quality; by now, I don’t believe Kurosawa is actually able to make a bad or even just a mediocre movie. Among the themes creeping up again and again in the director’s films, alienation is one of the strongest and clearly of great importance to him. In the case of Creepy, Kurosawa concerns himself with the quiet alienation between members of a family, with people who are nominally close going through the motions of personal relations, never even getting up the energy to shout much about their problems – that would, after all, be emotional, and the characters in the film are mostly involved in shutting out their emotions for another until only the outer veneer of them exists.

It’s this gap between what they actually feel and try not to feel, and what they express the film’s serial killer thrives on, dominating family members and playing them against one another by providing them with the opportunity to violently express all the things they leave unsaid as well as with drugs that makes it so much easier for them to keep the emotions they are afraid of at bay. There’s even more to the character, in the way he uses whom he leaves alive of the families he preys on to construct a fake family of his own; in a fitting bit of irony he certainly doesn’t appreciate, a family that is quite a bit more built on lies then the ones he destroys ever were.

A look at Creepy’s basic plot construction might raise a few eyebrows, for Kurosawa asks you to accept that the serial killer Koichi begins to hunt just happens to be his neighbour now and that said serial killer is – apparently without violence - able to turn a reasonable woman like Yasuko into his drug-addled accomplice over the course of a few days. However, I don’t think Kurosawa is actually interested in making the kind of straightforward thriller where this thing would be a problem, for both these narrative problems (if you want to call them such) – as well as some rather more minor ones later on – fit very well into the film’s meaning: Nishino just happens to be the Takakura’s neighbour because, the film suggests, every family is like them, so he might as well be theirs, and Yasuko falls as quickly as she does because she needs exactly the kind of destruction and/or structure (both things seem closely related in the film; see also Nishino’s house that is at once a building site and a well constructed death trap) the killer provides.

While Creepy is sometimes unwilling to play to the standard rules of the thriller, it still uses many a trope and many a visual concept from the genre. Kurosawa is colliding these with the earnest Japanese domestic drama most beloved by western critics when it comes to the country’s movie output (and one he has worked in as well) explores what happens during and after the collision, quite literally finding the horror beneath the calm bourgeois surface in the wreckage. And Creepy is truly a horror film, too, full of moments of expectant dread when another character steps into Nishino’s house, a place nobody leaves unchanged (and few alive); culminating in various acts of violence that are as haunting as they are not just because of Kurosawa’s unflinching depiction of them, but because of the natures of the perpetrators, and what this means.

The acting is spectacular throughout, with Teruyuki Kagawa’s indeed very creepy performance certainly a stand-out, but also nuanced work by Takeuchi (who easily convinces the viewer of things that should be difficult to swallow) and Nishijima.


It’s all held together by moments of incredible filmmaking. Just watch the way the scene becomes darker and darker, and the rooms closer and closer in Koichi’s interview with Saki Honda, and that’s just one perfectly staged and imagined scene among dozens. Kurosawa is equally adept at the moments of horror and dread as he is at the domestic drama (with echoes of very classic Japanese cinema in the last one, not surprisingly), but more importantly, he easily keeps a film under control that would in lesser hands burst under the pressure of too much meaning, too many genres colliding, and too many improbabilities, and so proves that all these elements do indeed belong together in Creepy.