Once again here's Mark Gilson at the New York Asian Film Festival, reporting on a film that I can't wait to see: Takeshi Shimizu's Marebito.
Marebito (The Stranger from Afar) is the latest from Japanese director Takashi Shimizu, and one of the films I was most looking forward to seeing when it was announced in the NYAFF lineup. Shimizu is best known to an American audience as the director of The Grudge, based on his own series of films in Japan, where they are known as the Ju-On series. The first 2 installments of Ju-On were broadcast on Japanese television as part of a horror anthology series. The first televised Ju-On installment even featured Chiaki Kuriyama, now known to film fans as Kill Bill's GoGo Yubari.
The 2 Ju-On TV movies did well enough in the ratings, but it was chatter on message boards and newsgroups across Japan that brought the series it's early notoriety. This series was seriously scaring people, and a theatrical version was greenlighted. That was 2003's excellent Ju-On, remade last year as The Grudge.
Marebito was shot on DV in 8 days almost concurrently with The Grudge. It's probably safe to say that Hollywood isn't going to rush to snatch up the remake rights for this one, but that's not an insult against Shimizu. Marebito is atmospheric and cerebral, the kind of film you need to see more than once to be able to fully appreciate. Part of what made Ju-On so enjoyable to me was the intricacy of the story behind the scares. I found Marebito lacking in jump out of your seat scares, but definitely rich in story.
The basic plot of Marebito centers around Masuoka, a freelance cameraman played by filmmaker Shinya Tsukamoto. Masuoka seems isolated from the world unless he's seeing it through a video camera viewfinder, or playing back on a monitor. A lot of footage is seen as video, giving the whole production a unique secondary viewpoint for the main character. By chance, he's on the scene of a gruesome suicide in a subway station, which he captures on video, and subsequently becomes obsessed with. Wanting to know what the man saw that drove him to take his own life, Masuoka heads deep into the subterranean world under Tokyo.
What follows is a true descent (by way of popular and Lovecraftian hellscapes) into the depths, where Masuoka ultimately finds a naked woman chained to a rock. Is this what the man saw that drove him to take his own life? Masuoka brings the gaunt, feral woman back to his small apartment, and keeps her like a pet, naming her simply F. Strange things start to happen after that. Masuoka buys a cellphone with a remote camera to keep tabs on F, and begins receiving strange calls telling him about the mistake he made by taking her. A woman who claims to be his wife demands to talk to him and see their daughter. And F is suffering, perhaps even starving. When Masuoka realizes that human blood is what sustains F, things take a dark turn.
Marebito left me with a lot of questions, and a desire to see the film again to sort them out. Is Masuoka the "stranger from afar" of the title, seeing the world only through a camera lens and removed from a sense of his own humanity and morality? Is he seeking terror because his own life is so desensitized? In all honesty, I don't really know. Marebito left me with a lot of questions. There's a scene in the film that takes place in Masuoka's apartment where we see that he has a giant t M.C. Escher print hanging on his wall. I'm pretty sure that was no coincidence, and Escher's strange self-perpetuating worlds that follow and defy logic create a good analogy for Marebito's story. This movie may have left me a little disappointed at first, but I found myself wanting to see it again, to answer the questions I was left with. General J-Horror fans may not find this their cup of tea, but Shimizu fans willing to scratch the surface will find a lot to uncover.
Reviewed by Mark Gilson.