When Tatsuya’s estranged mom suddenly passes away, he is forced to head out to her old, isolated village and meet the family he has never known, the Tajimi Family. On the way there, he bumps into private detective Kosuke Kindaichi, who reveals he was actually hired by the mysterious family to track Tatsuya down. But it is definitely not a warm welcome. Once he arrives, Tatsuya finds out he is the unexpected heir to the Tajimi family line. Turns out, his grandfather once carried out a massive, brutal massacre in the town, leaving the locals permanently traumatized. Because of that cursed family history, the hostile villagers immediately treat Tatsuya like public enemy number one.
Things get crazy pretty fast when everyone with a stake in the Tajimi inheritance shows up, triggering a massive wave of gory serial killings targeting those very stakeholders. Making things even creepier, each murder is modeled after the masked characters from a traditional village dance, pushing the town to a breaking point of extreme tension and violence. With everything spiraling into pure paranoia, Detective Kindaichi has to scramble to unmask the killer and figure out the motive before the whole place completely explodes under some twisted, demonic complications.
Seishi Yokomizo’s novel The Village of Eight Graves is a property that was already brought to film once before, in 1977. Anyone who takes on adapting a Seishi Yokomizo novel, from a writer known as the "King of Golden Age Crime Fiction", understands that this is a massive undertaking. With 77 Kosuke Kindaichi novels and short stories—selling over 55 million copies domestically—Kindaichi is the most famous fictional sleuth in Japan, someone akin to Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot.
Side note. Events in the original novel were based on the Tsuyama Incident - the real-life crime that inspired the book. It is crazy and tragic.
Famed Japanese supernatural horror director Takashi Shimizu takes his signature bloody folk-horror aesthetic and applies it to a traditional murder mystery story and its logical deduction narrative structure for the first time in his career. The closest the director ever came to a mystery-centric plot prior to this film was two decades ago with his film Reincarnation. But between the Ju-on franchise and the Terror Village trilogy, Shimizu has worked with genre tropes from police procedurals and investigative tropes, to looking into urban legends, historical atrocities, and disappearances in isolated rural communities. This specific story is right up his alley, just under a more formal structure in which he could inject his own style and flavor.
Gravestones is a delicious mix of horror and murder mystery, a folk-horror feature film combining elements of the detective genre, slasher films, and Jhorror. Watch enough murder mysteries and the structure is familiar. A detective is called into town by someone or a group to investigate something that has yet to be solved. As they look into the murder, or many murders, secrets are revealed, and eventually the killer has been found.
What takes Gravestones to a different place are the supernatural elements and deadly violence. And this fusion of murder mystery and elements of JHorror makes sense because nothing raises the stakes like visceral bodily harm: bludgeoning, dismemberment, stabbings, etc. Add to that elements of hauntings and supernatural events because the ghosts of the past have been brought to light. What you get is a murder mystery movie for dyed-in-the-wool horror fans.
One of the first moments we meet any surviving members of Tatsuya’s family is with his aunts. Two delicate, grayish and disembodied hands wrap around the edges of the shoji (those traditional rice paper sliding doors) then a face appears. Then another pair of hands also wrap around the edge of the shoji and a second face appears. Once we see those hands and fingers wrap around like that we know we are in a safe, familiar, supernatural horror space. There is only more to come.
However, Gravestones is not without some of that vintage straight-faced Japanese humor, brought to life by private detective Kindaichi himself (played wonderfully by Matsuya Onoe). His presence adds a bit of whimsy to it all. There is not a lot, just enough to lighten the mood from time to time, before we go deeper and darker into the story and the Tajimi Family’s past. We are fans of Japanese humor styles, and it is good to let out tension during films like this one.
What we found interesting, aside from all the horror elements that made us grin from ear to ear, was that Kindaichi is not as central a character as we thought he would be, given the original property’s cultural status and those comparisons to other pop-culture detective standouts. Operating instead as part of the ensemble, mostly remaining at the side of Tatsuya in a protective way, you could say that Kindaichi is more family to the young man than any of his actual relatives are.
Village of Eight Gravestones is a fun mix of a classic whodunit and creepy J-horror. Takashi Shimizu takes a predictable detective formula and injects it with brutal violence, ghosts from the past and present, and eerie imagery that will make any horror fan smile. Plus, the deadpan Japanese humor is timed perfectly to let you break the tension before things get too dark.
It is also great how the movie handles Detective Kindaichi. Subverting our expectations, instead of taking over the spotlight like you would expect, he plays a protective backup role to Tatsuya, which actually gives the story a nice emotional core. If you love horror and want a fresh spin on a murder mystery, you definitely need to check this one out.