First a bit about the story. A young director working in the japanese studio system is making a WWII period film requiring strong emotional scenes from two young actresses. There is quite a bit of plot revolving around the casting of the actresses, as well as illumination of their very different personalities and maturation. The director has to fight against agents and studio brass to cast the actors he wants to cast, and this preoccupies much of the early portion of the film.
While screening dailies, the production crew stumbles upon a strange accident. Some of the negative they were using appears to have been previously exposed, and has portions of a much older Japanese film featuring a rather transfixing actress from the past. The young Director is particularly intrigued, as the film seems to trigger a childhood recollection of watching the film years earlier on TV. He assigns the Studio editor to dig up information on this film, to put his mind at ease, and the film production proceeds from there, although clearly now haunted by questions about this other film, and its mysterious star.
If you are a fan of Ringu, now remade in the US as The Ring, you will no doubt find it interesting how many of the same ideas and motifs are present in Ghost Actress. In many ways, in retrospect, Ghost Actress appears to be a working out of stylistic and narrative techniques which made Ringu such a huge success.
The problems with Ghost Actress can primarily be traced back to the muddy script, which poses many questions without answering any. As I mentioned, much of the early film proves in the end to be entirely irrelevant to the central plot, and there isn't a strong linear thread driving the protagonist of the film, namely the young Director. He simply seems to be reacting to the situational dilemmas confronting him, and despite the nerdy likableness of Actor Yuurei Yanagi, doesn't illicit a lot of concern for his predicament or obsessions.
The conclusion of the film however, is undeniably powerful, and hints at Director Hideo Nakata's talent for combining supernatural themes with striking visual and sound design to great unnerving effect.
