By Brian Hu
A man hungry for horror meets a girl with an appetite for blood in Takashi Shimizu's disappointing Marebito.
Since 2000, Takashi Shimizu has made seven features, five of which have a combination of the words “Ju-on: The Grudge” in its title. Of the other two, one is Tomie: Re-birth, a sequel to Ataru Oikawa's Tomie. The other is Marebito, allegedly filmed on digital in eight days between the productions of Ju-on: The Grudge 2 and The Grudge. The result is surprisingly not so much a horror film but a film about the desire to be horrified. Its protagonist is a jaded, young Tokyo man Masuoka, who wields a camcorder around the city in search for the soul of terror. He thinks he sees it in the gaze of a bearded man who commits suicide by thrusting a pair of scissors in his right eye, and somehow this leads the amateur videographer to lurking around dark alleyways looking for more terror and opening doors that are probably shut for a reason.
Marebito (aka “Stranger from Afar,” or so the English subtitles tell us) thus probes the masochistic impulses of the horror genre, exploring what makes people walk into strange dark rooms when any fan of Freddy films can tell you that's a grave mistake. The film becomes a critique of the genre, especially when we realize that the Tokyo man (played by Tetsuo director Shinya Tsukamoto) isn't so interested in actual horror than how horror looks when played back from his digital camcorder. Unfortunately, it turns out Shimizu has relatively little more to say on this subject, and proves to be more deft at stylish horror than a full-blown critique. Nothing surprising -- or terribly disappointing -- about that, but unfortunately, the scares don't come as naturally this time out compared to Shimizu's Grudge pictures, although Shimizu does show that he doesn't need a 35mm camera, a professional crew, or a Hollywood production schedule to concoct frightening images.
Case in point are the scenes of Masuoka wandering in what seem to be the mythical underworld of Tokyo: passageways darkly lit to bring out the damp stench of an old subway and the ghosts which inhabit them. But as soon as Shimizu has Masuoka interacting with the oddball ghouls, the frigid atmosphere loses much of its effect as the encounters turn out to be more awkward and less terrifying than you'd expect. All the while, Masuoka's masochism becomes less interesting than the film's stylishness, and we begin to lose interest.
Fortunately, the film picks up again as it enters its main narrative. Masuoka discovers a half-dead naked shackled girl in the dark tunnels, and before long, she's in his apartment as his freaky new mute pet. Turns out she doesn't feed on food but on blood (preferably human). Oh, and she may or may not be his daughter. The incestual/pedophilic/necrophilic nature of their relationship is left untouched -- which to tell the truth, is probably to our benefit -- although the brief scenes with a woman who may or may not be his ex-wife hint at the possibility of his sexual madness. That is, when the scenes of him feeding the girl's infant-like lips fresh blood out of his gashed body don't give it away.
I liked that the film eschewed the easy tricks -- things popping out from the dark, demented little children -- and that it doesn't become another in the long line of possessed-item Asian horror films (Phone, The Red Shoes, The Ring, Cello, etc.) or haunted house films (which go back to the beginning of horror films, if not horror literature) such as his interminable Grudge films. And while Shimizu is more stylist than philosopher, I appreciate this foray into low-budget, genuinely creepy filmmaking, and that he's become enough of an auteur that such a minor film can see American distribution. Fortunately for Marebito, the ability to combine intelligence with scariness in Japanese cinema is somewhat of a commercial liability: Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Pulse took four years to arrive in the states while Yutaka Tsuchiya's incredible Peep “TV” Show is still without a U.S. distributor. Both films are meditations on fear and the digital image, and both reveal fissures in the psyche of society that Marebito could only hint at before abandoning genuine cultural criticism for weird sexual hang-ups. Weirdly enough, Shimizu has more to say about cultures of fear and global/local interactions in his Hollywood remake The Grudge than in Marebito, and for that reason I say to The Grudge 2 and the return of Sarah Michelle Gellar: bring it on! How's that for horror masochism?
Published: Thursday, December 22, 2005
