Séance

The Sixth Sense and A Simple Plan by way of Martin Heidegger, this genre-bending thriller is directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa.

Katsuhiko (Koji Yakusho) is a mild-mannered sound-technician who is married to Junco (Jun Fubuki).

While at first glance Junco seems to be an average hausfrau, she possesses great clairvoyant powers.

Though she has slowly and quietly built a reputation as a medium, she proves to be completely incapable of working in a normal service industry job; she has the unfortunately tendency of being able to see the crimes of her patrons. Katsuhiko is aware of her unusual abilities but prefers to think of her as "normal."

Young psychology graduate student Hayakawa (Teuyoshi Kusanagi) invites Junco to join his study on the paranormal. At the same time, the police are desperately searching for a young girl who was kidnapped by an ex-cop turned pervert.

At Hayakawa's behest, the cops consult with Junco as to the child's whereabouts. Ironically enough, the girl escapes her captor and takes refuge in Katsuhiko's equipment case while he records sounds in the mountains.

The next day, Junco's psychic sonar goes off and she discovers the missing child in their garage. This freak happenstance awakens a long-dormant ambition in Junco: convinced that her discovery was not a striking enough find, she hatches an ill-conceived scheme to make it seem more dramatic. While Katsuhiko tends to the unconscious girl, Junco scatters clues throughout the western suburbs of Tokyo and then informs the police of her psychic "insights."

As the film progresses, their plan goes awry and the child meets a bad end. Junco's abilities boomerang on her, and soon she and Katsuhiko are haunted by the ghost of the girl. Noted stars Yukari Ishida and Show Aikawa make cameos. This film was screened at the 2000 Toronto Film Festival.

Overall, this movie (and Cure for that matter) is nicely done. With Seance, appropriately, a lot of negative space mise-en-scene was deftly carried out; with Cure, narrative as well as formal (eg spliced split-second frames, abrupt scene cuts etc) ellipses are done well with good editing. I liked the continuity of both the protagonist and the restaurant (albeit from a different shooting angle) through both films. My only problem with it (and Cure) is that sometimes the aesthetics feels contrived, and the understatement/'minimalism' is, ironically, overwrought & cliché. There's no greatness here (in terms of psychological horror/terror, there are much more genius auteurs in both the East and West, eg the 'other' Kurosawa's Rashomon and Polanski's earlier films, to name a few respectively), but it has thought, and is still better than 90% of the sh*t out there.

I am a great fan of Kurosawa's movies, yet I find this film a weak shadow of his usual work. I think this comes in large measure from his own statement that this film is a combination of a horror movie combined with a crime movie and the original 1960s story. It seems just too convoluted to succeed. On top of that, he claims that there were numerous rewritings of the 1960s story to fit it into the real world, whatever that means. The Left Elbow Index considers seven elements in film--acting, production sets, dialogue, plot, film continuity, character development, and artistry--on a scale from 10 for very good to 5 for average and to 1 for it needs some help. The acting, production sets, and dialogue are all rated average. The acting seems stilted and seems better timed to fit a soap. The production sets appear to be little more than what one sees in one's daily environs. And the dialogue seems to fit modern life, no great philosophies and no great blunders. The plot is rated weak since it appears difficult to sort out important elements of plot from trivial events in the film. The elements of plot and the emotional level of the film seem not to fit together well, even the suspense scenes appear hollow. The film continuity appears upset by the episodic TV nature of the juxtaposition of scenes, which seems to present too much clutter. I wonder why film makers tend towards putting characters in autos and driving them in and out of scenes, like Roy Rogers cowboy movies. We know how Roy got to and from where ever he was going, must he always be seen jumping on and off Trigger? There seems little character development to speak of, probably because the characters do not appear to be in a suspense, a horror story, or the real world. The artistry is rated as average, keeping in mind that average for Kurosawa is excellent for others. The close-ups are good and there are some interesting camera angles. The Left Elbow Index average is 3.3, up to a 5.0 when equated with the IMDb scale. The film is worth seeing, as any of Kurosawa's work is, but don't expect the master at his best.

This moody Japanese movie by revered director Kiyoshi Kurosawa is a loose remake of the classic 1964 chiller "Séance on a Wet Afternoon." Either that, or it's based on the same source novel, which I haven't read. Nearly every element of the plot is tweaked and twisted, with an emphasis on the supernatural. The lead actress is no Kim Stanley, and her character's predicament is a bit different, but she does a fine job as a psychic trying to come to terms with her powers. "Séance" was apparently made for television, but it really lacks the typical styling of typical made-for-TV movies. It's better and more somber than Kurosawa's "Horror Theater" TV segment. It features crisp, clean cinematography and the scary sequences are enhanced by inventive camera-work. Unfortunately, these scenes are too few and far between. The majority of the film moves at a snail's pace. Whereas "Wet Afternoon" features bizarre yet captivating characters that keep the film from being a complete bummer, there's not much in this film to distract from the overwhelming depressing nature and tone. This makes it difficult to get through in one sitting.

I cannot remember being scared by a movie like this. "The Sixth Sense" had very scary parts, but this was scary throughout. Writer/director Kiyoshi Kurosawa, who showed us what he could do when he transformed the thriller "Cure" into a chilling horror-like ending, now brings us pure horror with "Séance (Korei)". If you think the little girl in Poltergeist or the Exorcist are scary, you've never been haunted by a little girl before. Kurosawa makes this little darling so creepy that you might see her in the streets for the next few days (I'm slightly exaggerating here, but aren't movies always a bit exaggerated). Which is not exaggerated, however, is the skill Kurosawa has to entrance the viewer in a slow cumulating fear that creeps up from the bottom of your spine and spread through your shivering body. He uses hallways, shadows, rooms and corners like a magician and makes you feel right in the middle of the action, frightened, expecting and not knowing what to do.

Visually mesmerizing (unintentional reference to what we learn in "Cure"), "Seance" still has a solid story which puts characters in an interesting situation and begs the audience to think "what would you do if this happened to you?". Acting is very potent, especially from lead actor Koji Yakusho. The story has enough twists and turns to keep you captivated and some actual substance as to the role of the paranormal in today's society. What endures undoubtedly, is the atmosphere of fright.

If you want to see a scary movie, see this one.

Note: For those who think this is a "Sixth Sense" knock-off, please be advised that this movie was made in Japan and that there were ghost stories there way before Hollywood. I saw this movie at a special screening, in the presence of Kiyoshi Kurosawa, and he was telling us that he based the idea for the ghosts in his story on various credible people he knows who claim that they actually witnessed ghost apparitions. It was a recurring theme that the room seemed colder when they appeared, so he made the breath visible to indicate that. The fact that he portrayed them without a face was his own interpretation and what he wished to express to the viewer.