In short: Kidan Piece of Darkness (2015/16)

This is an anthology movie with ten short horror stories by six Japanese directors (and no, of course I have found nothing on the Net to help identify who did which segment), among them the three house favourites Koji Shiraishi, Yoshihiro Nakamura and Mari Asato, as well as Eisuke Naito, Hiroki Iwasawa and Hajime Ohata. Apparently, this is “based on Fuyumi Ono’s bestselling books”, but I can’t tell you if it’s the same Fuyumi Ono known for their manga and fantasy work, though I wouldn’t be surprised. I’m a source of great information today.

Given the number of segments in a 100 minute running time, it’ll probably surprise nobody that the stories are comparatively simple – though not necessarily straightforward – and based on or directly inspired by contemporary Japanese urban legends and/or early Japanese creepypasta (the borders between these realms have become rather vague once the Internet hit it big), so even if you’re like me and have no clue about Ono’s work, you’ll recognize the structures, beats and quite a few of the creatures haunting the tales. That’s not, however, much of a problem to me, for there’s always a place for the kind of short horror that understands itself as a form of folklore in my heart, particularly when it is as well realized as this one.

There are quite a few projects with a similar approach to this dribbling in from Japan, and most of them are rather enjoyable, but they do tend to have a rather cheap look and feel, whereas Kidan seems definitely more upmarket. Not the big cinema kind of upmarket, but the one where things don’t look actively cheap and impoverished. The experienced and highly capable group of directors helps there too, of course, milking every ounce of atmosphere they can out of the handful of scenes every story has to work with, building tension and a surprising amount of creepiness out of the well-known tropes involved.

There’s an eerie kind of weirdness surrounding most of these tales, the convictions of talented storytellers that help make some of the more preposterous ideas here disturbing and even somewhat horrifying, never giving a viewer the space and time to look at things and sneer. It’s lovely work, really.


The film turns out to be a bit more cleverly structured than typical of this sort of project, starting out with pretty traditional urban legends and becoming stranger with each episode, culminating in a final trio of stories that are so quietly strange as to delight my old hard heart quite immensely. Atypical of anthology movies, there’s no bad middle tale here, either, every director bringing full focus to their little story or stories, making a small project feel rather impressive.

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.

In short: Busu (2005)

aka The Booth

Because of renovation work, his station puts Shogo (Ryuta Sato), the host of a late night call-in radio show specialized in love advice, into an old, seldom-used studio somewhere deep down in the cellar of the station's building. What Shogo initially doesn't know (but his producer seems just too glad to tell him), is that studio 6 is supposed to be haunted by the ghost of another DJ who took his life right there. What nobody except Busu's viewers can tell Shogo is that the DJ 30 years ago didn't exactly commit suicide, but was the victim of a ghost from his past for whose death he was responsible.

Strange things begin to happen during the course of Shogo's show. Peculiar noises come from the studio speakers, a woman's voice repeatedly calls the DJ a liar, and everything that can go wrong with the show does go wrong. Some of the things that are happening might just be practical jokes of Shogo's crew, whose members have all been victims of the DJ's tendency to act like a jerk in varying degrees, while others just might be products of his own guilty conscience.

What Shogo feels guilty for slowly becomes clear during flashbacks caused by the stories his show's callers tell him. Looks like he killed his girlfriend while he was breaking up with her, and then ran; not in cold blood, but leaving her dead all the same.

Soon enough, the accidents, the strange happenstances and his own mind lead Shogo to the edge of a breakdown.

The Booth is the last film Yoshihiro Nakamura did in the early part of his career that was predominantly dedicated to the horror genre. Most of these early films Nakamura directed aren't too easily available outside of Japan, leaving the director's name more connected to his scriptwriting for films like Hideo Nakata's Dark Water in our parts. Now, Nakamura writes and directs very particular comedies like the absolutely lovely Fish Story.

Although Busu (also written by Nakamura) isn't exactly a comedy, there is still something blackly comic about watching Shogo's quick descent from professional calm and charm into first inadvertent honesty and then what once was called a nervous breakdown, while the flashbacks are getting clearer and clearer about how much of a jerk (and true misogynist at heart) the DJ really is. But Shogo's character being what it is without any actual insights into his psychology (people usually have reasons for being like they are) also results in the film's biggest flaw in my book in that it makes it difficult to feel much more about what happens to the man than grim satisfaction. The film shows the DJ's final destiny as comeuppance for someone who truly had it coming, and though it's nice to see him squirm, his basic loathsomeness makes it difficult to feel much else about what happens.

There's just not much that's disturbing about this particular horror movie, unless one counts not being disturbed by terrible things happening to a terrible person as disturbing, which would be an interesting direction to go into. Alas, I don't think that's an emotional reaction the film is actually trying to evoke, but more me being the soft-hearted kind of guy I am.

Still, unpleasantly enough, it is satisfying to see Shogo squirm, as it is satisfying to see Nakamura use his probably extremely tight budget to make an equally tight film.

 

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In short: Fish Story (2009)

It's the year 2012 and a meteor is going to collide with Earth in about five hours, destroying everything and everyone.

A cynical older guy goes into a record store, where two younger men are listening to music, pretending nothing's going to happen. Turns out that they have talked themselves into the naive belief that a group of five imaginary heroes and the obscure song "Fish Story" (with a mysterious silent minute) by an even more obscure Japanese proto punk band are going to save the world.

Funnily enough, they are right. A handful of stories from the Japanese past that are connected through the song and a few other elements will in the end explain how and why. Before we can understand, we will witness a normal loser like you and me mustering his courage, a champion of justice, a sleepy and sad school girl, an end times cult with bad timing, the recording of "Fish Story" and more.

Fish Story is an utterly wonderful little film I really don't want to say too much about. With some films, there's the need to experience them for oneself without hearing too much clever talk (or bad puns) beforehand, a need to listen to them and find out if they are the sort of films that talk to you.

As a film about - and very much in love and hope and faith with - the strange, nearly invisible (like lipstick traces on a cigarette) influence of cultural ephemera, the obscure, the imperfect and the weird on people's lives and people's hearts, Fish Story does talk to me. These are the things this blog is very much about, after all. I'm even pretty sure it is what I believe in.

 

Technorati-Tags: japanese movies,sf,comedy,in short,yoshihiro nakamura