Review Of Kurosawa Kiyoshi's LOFT
OK, so, I'm a little late with this (OK, VERY late). But this film had just come out in Malaysia. I've been told Retribution will be coming soon. It was quite a surprise to read that Retribution is a commissioned project while Loft is a more personal project closer to Kurosawa's heart.
I've been a huge fan of Kurosawa Kiyoshi ever since I saw Kairo (Pulse) on the big screen at the Singapore International Film Festival some years ago. I've since seen almost every one of his major works, and probably the only one that grated on my nerves was the unbearably pretentious Charisma.
Loft came and went over here without much attention. Granted, there was no advertising or promotion. It's strange why the distributor never made an effort for any kind of publicity. Horror is always big business, and some unknown crap from some dark corner of the earth has been known to get at least a small ad space in the papers.
Loft comes with very good intentions that are never followed through. It bears all the Kurosawa trademarks that we have become familiar with. Kurosawa is a master of the haunted space, and his use of shadows and corners are so effective, he just needs to show you a shot of an empty chair in the middle of a room, and you'll immediately get the shivers.
There's a lot of this in Loft. And its set-up is so basic-horror that predictability registers at once. But of course, Kurosawa's masterful mise-en-scene still delivers. I mean, how many times have we heard this story before: a blocked writer decides to take a retreat in the countryside only to face mysterious circumstances there?
The mysterious circumstances here begin with a scene straight out of Rear Window: the writer, Reiko (Nakatani Miki) watches from her window at night, as her mysterious neighbour (Toyokawa Etsushi) carries what looks like a body wrapped in a sheet, into the next-door warehouse. In fact, Kurosawa does more Hitchcock than anything else here. Later, there's a scene right out of Vertigo.
Turns out that the "body" is really a 1,000-year-old mummy, and the mysterious neighbour is a university professor. And then, there's also the matter of the ghost of a woman in black in the writer's house. The connection between the mummy, the ghost, the writer and the professor is gradually revealed.
The centrepiece of the film is certainly the sequence during a blackout. The professor, fearing his visiting students would discover that he had been secretly keeping the precious mummy in his lab, asks Reiko if she would keep it for a couple days. With the mummy in her house, and the lights suddenly going out, the fun begins. There are genuine suspense and shocks, and a lingering sense of dread that Kurosawa is so good at. There's also a scene in the forest, when the writer tails the ghost to a clearing. The editing and camera movements are so brilliantly married, the final pan is a real shocker.
Unfortunately, the second half of the film falls apart completely. A sudden turn into cheesy romance territory that is completely inexplicable, terrible dialogue, and an unintentionally hilarious ending all seem very strange when the film had started off in a classy way.
Still, the idea is thought-provoking. Here's a story about Woman, and what happens when Man loses control of her. She refuses to do what she's told, even refuses to die. "I've come back to destroy men," so she says (or something to that effect) in one scene.Taking into consideration that all of Kurosawa's films have been reactions to social mores and conditions, you start to see the all possibilities that Loft could have been.
Could have been.
All the seriousness of the issue starts to fade away, the moment Kurosawa decides to provide an answer to the burning question we've been forced to contemplate all through the film's running time: Will the mummy move?
During that moment in the film, I believe I had never heard an audience laugh so hard in my life.
