Movie Appraisal: Kaidan (怪談) (2007) and J-Horror Theater Wrap-Up

From the director of Ringu, Hideo Nakata, we have Kaidan, a movie about a curse and a ghost. As the fifth movie in the J-Horror Theater series, I wasn't expecting much. Hell, the fourth and sixth movies were not all that good in my opinion, with the sixth one, Kyofu, being a trainwreck of a movie. Kaidan is a masterpiece. While calling it strictly a horror movie is laughable, it is a great movie to just watch. Hideo Nakata could never make a better movie than this, and yet he would still have made one of the great ghost story movies of all time with this one.

While the story is a tradition Japanese one about a legacy of death, a curse, and love, it is also fantastically put together. A moneylender is killed by a broken Samurai in old Japan. The Samurai dies himself soon after, and their children grow up orphans. The moneylender's daughters grow to be beautiful and powerful in Old Tokyo (Edo), while the Samurai's son is very clearly of a lower status. He falls in love with one of the daughters, but their relationship is cursed, and when he decides to leave her, he is cursed as well.

And that's the basic story. I know it has been told before in movies like The Depths (1957) and others, but this is one of the more recent re-tellings of an old tale with a tragic story. The movie is art in motion throughout, showcasing both acting talent and a story that works incredibly well. It does take on the old idea that the sins of the father are passed down to the child, almost literally in the case of this movie. It shows that fate is fixed and cannot be changed. And a curse, a woman scorned, and ultimately fate... those things cannot be avoided. They will follow one around for the rest of his days.

Maybe it's a little silly, but a movie like this, made so traditionally about such a tradition matter, is exactly what I want to watch. It is one of the only period horror movies that I know about, which makes it very unique and incredibly interesting in its own right. I wasn't expecting what I received, neither the quality nor the absolute passion evident in this film.

Again, this is not strictly a horror film. While it has horror elements to it (mostly in small pieces and mostly at the end of the movie), it is much more of a historical drama of a sort. I would even call it a romance movie at times. While it doesn't always work, it damn well tries very hard to be something special, and I truly appreciate that. It hearkens back constantly to the ancestral sins as well showing that one's own sins can damn one as well. The way Shinkichi (the lead character) treats the women throughout the film can only be described as disheartening. While appearing to be a good man on the surface, he takes advantage of them, leaves them once they cannot give him what he wants, and finds another, prettier face. I know customs were different once upon a time, but I find it kind of sickening how easily he slimes his way through the story. Even then, there was a certain sadness I felt towards him at the end of the movie, before his ultimate fate is decided. It takes a great movie to make me feel something for a character I loathe, and this is certainly a special sort of movie.

Again, there really isn't horror here, so despite the moniker of J-Horror Theater, this is much more of a traditional ghost story, one of the ghost seeking revenge certainly, but one that shows very little in the way of actual scares. I would almost say that this movie is made in a way to be a throwback to early Japanese horror movies of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. It has that style and feel to it, although I could be wrong, I suppose.

Anyway, this is a great movie and I recommend it all the way, just don't expect a horror movie, because this isn't really one of them, not in the modern sense of the term anyway.


So, I guess we're done with all six movies of the J-Horror Theater. What six movies they were too! We saw everything in the Japanese Horror repertoire, from Infection with its subtle gore and mindscrew attitudes to Kyofu and its terrible and bizarre story. We saw Premonition and Reincarnation, both with their slow builds and near-perfect stories, both full of so much horror and awe that they'll always remain in my mind as true quality. And then we saw Retribution, a movie that I should have liked, and ended up finding far too dry for my taste. But even that one had a certain something, even if it was simply a single perfect scene. And finally we have Kaidan, a traditional ghost story I won't soon forget. All six movies were something to watch, even if I found two of them less than stellar. All-in-all the J-Horror Theater experiment was a success, really showing the quality that Japanese horror movies can achieve when their best directors take on the task of making amazing movies.

I'm glad I finally reviewed all these movies. They've been on my plate for years and years. I have a few more series and sets of movies like this to review, probably not this year (not at this point anyway), but next year and the years after I'll need more horror movies to review, so why not? I don't think I'll forget these movies, and if this year goes down as my J-Horror Theater October, then so be it. I think I can be proud of these reviews and these movies for the most part. I will admit I really wasn't expecting much out of these last three reviews, especially since two out of my first three reviews of this series were fairly negative. I'm glad that these final three movies picked up the series, making it rise in my opinion, and making all the hours I put into watching and reviewing these movies definitely worth it.

Anyway, until tomorrow night... 

Movie Appraisal: Reincarnation (Rinne) (輪廻) (2005)

Reincarnation is my kind of horror movie. Being the third of the J-Horror Theater series, this film, like the first two, Infection and Premonition, also delivers a surprisingly amazing story as well as a scary as hell film. I'm actually really glad I've chosen to review all six of these movies this year because I've seen some amazing movies. I mean, wow. Yes, The Sylvian Experiments was terrible, and I wasn't hugely fond of Retribution either, but three out of five GREAT movies makes the whole series literally worth it. Yes, I have one more film to review, the fifth, Kaidan, which just might be coming soon, but I'm so pleased to have gotten to watch so many great horror movies this year so far.

This is a movie I won't spoil. I really think it is the creepiest so far, and well worth the watch. So, I give it a recommendation right away. Go watch this movie. It's so fulfilling, dealing with more philosophical elements, reincarnation (naturally), and fate, a theme which not enough movies truly explore. One of the reasons I don't want to spoil this movie is because there is a twist towards the end that is alone worth watching the movie for. It might be easy to see coming, but man, did it work for me even though I KNEW it was going to happen. Also, the reliance on fate and the past to tell the story here is one to behold. It is a mastery of storytelling rarely seen.

Can you tell I like this movie?

I do, by the way. I really like this movie.

The movie has a simple premise: A director wants to make a movie about the murder of eleven people in a hotel quite some time ago. He has a passion for the murder and wants it all to be perfect. While most of the movie is very slow-paced, used for building tension, atmosphere, and mystery, it works quite well, doing all of those things very effectively. There are flashbacks and memories throughout, mostly provided by those who are the reincarnated souls of those who were murdered in the hotel all those years ago. I seriously can't get over how effective the story is, and how insanely creepy the whole movie is despite its obvious lack of a ton of budget. I like how there seem to be callbacks to other famous horror movies as well, most notably The Changeling and its bouncing red ball and The Shining with Room 237. Because every single movie set in a hotel must have a room 237 reference. It is required by law. If you don't have a reference to it in your hotel movie you shall be beaten until you insert one in. I do enjoy those loving (and quick) references those. They work because they don't take away from this movie, and also because this movie is ridiculously good and can live up to and (in The Shining's case) exceed those other movies.

The faces at the beginning of the movie, the white faces in the trees, are so effective at creating the atmosphere in the movie right away. It drew me in and didn't let go. The visuals are fantastic throughout the movie, and the direction is superb, obviously showcasing a man with a great deal of talent. Oh, its the director of The Grudge, is it? And Marebito, another incredibly well directed movie. Takashi Shimizu, go ahead and take a bow. You have proven yourself as a master of the horror genre.

Oh, and the creepy doll that appears throughout the film? Yeah, I don't like creepy dolls. They freak me out. So, again, the movie is very effective at creeping me out.

I hate this doll.

Beyond that, this is the kind of horror movie I want to see every time I watch a scary movie. I want to see something original, unique, artistic, and ultimately very creepy. The atmosphere is great here. There's nothing extreme or gory about the movie. The direction is almost as interesting as an actual art-film, and the ending of the movie, with 8mm film interspersed with the actual movie is a grand experiment that really pays off. I don't know of many horror films, Japanese or otherwise, that can cut this deep, intriguing and scaring simultaneously so well. I know I have a ton of movies behind me and a few to come, but this movie right here, this one, Reincarnation, would alone be worth this entire month of reviews. Any better movies than this or movies on par with this one are just icing on the October cake. These reviews let me try new kinds of horror, and sometimes a gem can be a bit unknown or hidden from the public eye. This is the kind of movie I want to feature, one of such high quality and low notoriety, one that shows that horror is neither dead nor even suffering. People need to simply look in the right spots to find the really good stuff.

Movie Appraisal: Infection (Kansen) (感染) (2004)

"But he... He gets inside."

The best way to describe Infection is to call it a psychological horror mindscrew of a movie. I don't even know if the story is coherent enough to truly understand. It seems to be more focused on symbolism and interesting imagery than an actual plot. But I think that's also the point. I think it's an interesting movie, but one that is so utterly jumbled that sometimes it's more difficult to follow the psychology of the plot than just following the horror of it. As the first J-Horror Theater movie, this one is very good, giving the six movie "series" a great start. Director Masayuki Ochiai does a great job with directing, but his editor should be barred from ever editing again. It's a mess, seriously.

I went into this movie thinking it would be gory and awful to watch. I literally had to anticipate the gore effects that I really thought would be highlighting this movie, for better or worse. But this movie has very few truly gory moments to it, more lingering on characters' reactions to the offscreen gore than actual shots of gore. This is probably for budgetary reasons rather than artistic choice, but it worked well in my opinion, leaving more to the imagination and less to the eye, something that I always find effective.

Like Into the Mirror, this movie also has a focus on mirrors, to the point that this movie could have taken that movie's title and nobody would have known. I guess the idea here is that mirrors either tell the truth or give way to some alternate reality where guilt and conscience rule. And green blood. For reasons. I can't really understand the entirety of the plot or the point that they were trying to make. Sometimes these types of movies put symbolism for symbolism's sake into their movies. That could be the case here. I don't really know.

Anyway, Infection takes place at a hospital, following around a collection of nurses and doctors who are on a night shift. The hospital is overrun with patients (even though we only ever see a handful of them) and is financially sinking. Most of the first part of this movie is a medical drama unfolding, seeing how stressed these doctors and nurses are, seeing how difficult their work is, and seeing how exhaustion and the stress can lead to bad decision making.

A burned man falls from his bed, dies, is brought back to life, and then through medical error dies again, this time for good. The acting in this scene is excellent, as the doctors' both try to save one of their own by hiding the evidence of the error and bullying the nurses into accepting what they want to do to hide it. It's effective and eerie, with the whole scene playing out as if it could be pure comedy or pure sickening horror. Sometimes these things are difficult to pin down.

Throughout the beginning part of the movie, we are also treated to a collection of small scenes detailing an ambulance talking about a man with some kind of infectious disease that they found. These paramedics come into the hospital seeking help for the infected victim. Dr. Akiba, who is sort of the main character of the movie and the doctor who admitted error with the burn victim (in the scene after this), turns them away, which will have dire consequences on the rest of the movie. Again, burn victim dies from medical error, and then the chief nurse goes down to check the ER, only to find the infectious disease victim still there, the ambulance gone.

This is when the movie gets strange. Dr. Akai, the director of the hospital, has a collection of scenes being very adamant about studying the disease. His scenes are shocking in a way because of the way he acts. He is always stone-faced (except once), and he is filmed with some kind of filter, a green one, I believe, that leaves him looking washed-out and creepy. The victims organs are shown to be liquefying as well, but the person is still very much alive and coherent, even smiling at the doctors.

The movie rushes on, now being both confusing and disjointed, showing more a focus on horror than story. The nurse, four of them, die horrifically one-by-one, each taken out by the green infection starting from the chief nurse getting infected by the initial victim (whose body disappears) to each one of the others getting infected by one another, I believe. Parts of this movie can be confusing, which is why I'm kind of wondering myself what happened at times. Eventually, Dr. Uozumi, one of the lead characters, is also infected, and shown speaking to a person he had once killed accidentally. This incident cements the meaning of this movie and the infection to basically being something like guilt.

Dr. Akiba is told from the dead Akai (because Akai was the burn victim all along) that the infection is transmitted through the subconscious mind rather than through the air or by touch. This means that they were all infected in turn by the guilt they felt over the death of the patient or the way they treated someone else or how they screwed up medically once. Over this whole part of the film, and maybe I didn't catch every instance of this, but what it seems like is that the movie has the green film over it at times, showing some kind of alternate world... maybe even the mirror world where ghosts are still living as the old woman patient seems to imply many times.

The psychological elements show up near the end, as Dr. Akiba looks through a mirror and sees his blood as green blood, rather than the red blood he has in real life. And as a female doctor enters the hospital in the morning light, the awful truth is learned. The doctors and the nurses are all dead, no longer with the green blood and bile, but rather with red blood covering them, obviously killed by someone. Akiba (and the Pediatrician who wants to be a surgeon) are guilty of the crimes (at least in the eyes of the law).

And the film ends with the insanity of the final female doctor, Dr. Nakazono, after she signs off a boy from the beginning of the movie whose brain was bleeding, thus showing her the green blood world and her own infection. And then the boy with the fox mask shows up again, probably implying something with him, although I have no idea what. As an added thing, Akai, in Japanese, means red. Which probably has some meaning. Perhaps Dr. Akai was never real, more an implied person standing in for the real world or the infection. The final scene is Dr. Akiba, shut in the locker that kept opening earlier in the movie in the room they were trying to speed-decay the burn victim's corpse. His arm falls off with green blood attached. He is fully infected.

As a last point, there are some seriously scary moments to this movie, particularly the background scares that linger. Some of those moments were great visuals and left an impact on me. It will be hard to forget that chief nurse standing on the cot in the background of a single shot, her face as white as paper, knowing what will come next, and being unable to do a thing about it. Great direction all around, really showcasing the horrific elements of the story.

Oh man. This movie is both complex and very confusing at times. There are a great many details throughout the film, the blink-and-you'll-miss-them type of details. Honestly, this is a movie where a second viewing might be required just being of the complexity of detail. I would say that infection is all about guilt and that the infection attacks the guilty part of one's mind. Beyond that, I have no idea what this movie is. It's an effective horror movie, one with really bad editing, but great cinematography and direction. The acting is perfectly fine, although I wouldn't say anybody was particularly awesome in their role. It's a movie I would recommend as a horror movie for J-Horror fans. This movie is certainly not for everybody though, and I feel that to some it might be more frustrating and confusing than frightening. I liked it quite a bit, but also feel that it is far from perfect, particularly in its disjointed nature and focus on nothing at times. Check it out if you want an interesting little Japanese Horror movie. Just remember that it's all over the place in quality.

Movie Appraisal: The Sylvian Experiments (Kyofu) (Dread) (恐怖) (2010)

What the hell did I just watch?

I guess I should explain. If- Well, it's impossible to explain, but I'll try to say what I saw on screen. This is the most convoluted and confusing movie I've seen since Dreamland, and both share that whole science and ghost premise that makes both even more confusing. I guess I'll try to come up with an interpretation, but I seriously cannot promise anything.

The Sylvian Experiments is the final movie of the J-Horror Theater experience. (Yes, I'm reviewing all of these movies heavily out of order.) It is one of the stranger movies I've reviewed on this blog. It's gory at times, boring to the point of nearly putting me to sleep at other times, and ultimately has no coherent plot at all. I honestly have no idea if what I just watched meant something or if it was just an odd little movies for reasons unknown.

Where do I even start? I guess at the beginning. The movie goes in and out of the past, present, and future constantly, making it very difficult to follow. The movie starts with a middle-aged couple watching some neurological experiments that may let researchers see something beyond the living world. Their children, two daughters, come to them while they are watching and are very upset by the whole thing. Years later, a young woman named Miyuki, one of the daughters from the beginning of the movie agrees with four other people to commit suicide in a van. So, it's a suicide pact. Yeah. So, before we even have a moment to learn about her character she is already ready to kill herself. Kind of a bad start. We never learn why she wants to do such a thing, just that that's what she's decided to do.

Anyway, she disappears and ends up in her mother's lab where she and three of the others (one of the guys was a plant to capture them) are used in the same experiments from the movie at the beginning of the film. Their heads are cut open in some fairly gruesome scenes, and little sci-fi metal machines are inserted into their brains. Two of them die. Another is a virgin (which is important for some reason although we're never told why). Miyuki and the virgin, Rieko, disappear somehow from the underground hospital thing and end up being like ghosts, I think.

Meanwhile, Miyuki's sister, Kaori, has come to try to find her sister. She stays in her Miyuki's apartment, meets her boyfriend (eventually sleeping with him), and works kinda-sorta with a detective to find her. Kaori kind of becomes the central character in the movie, but her character is so flat and uninteresting that it is very difficult to relate with her. She does what she is told, never really fights anything, and is altogether a very weak character easily influenced by the other characters. While throughout most of the movie she is the point of view character, she ironically never shows a point of view herself.

The movie has some downright comical moments with the mother's two helpers and the boyfriend who was the mother's plant as well. Kaori is so ineffectual that it becomes a chore to watch her on screen. Rieko becomes virgin-pregnant with the afterlife itself. (I told you, this movie is freaking weird.) The detective is killed, there is a CGI afterlife light fog thing that kills all the "antagonists" (even though they barely did anything wrong), and... well, I'll get to the ending in a minute.

I just want to say that these four people who wanted to commit suicide wanted to die. Not to be a creepy and crazy person here, but they wanted to die. That's established. So, no, getting semi-tortured and experimented on isn't a good thing, but they wanted to die. So, why should I feel sympathy for them? I guess that's my ultimate point here without getting into any strange euthanasia principles.

Well, the movie ends in a fairly bogus way. I've liked this kind of ending in other movies, but it kind of defeats the whole purpose of the movie here. Yes, it turns out that in the end, Miyuki had probably died in the van with the other four. Although, the original plant in the van had a head wound, which seems suspicious and maybe not altogether a sign of suicide. So, I guess there could have been something there? I have no idea. I simply do not know what was meant by that. The detective is alive again, so that kind of says that nothing past their attempted suicides in the van in the beginning of the movie really happened.

But them Kaori's there at the end. How can she be there when we've actually really never seen the real her in the movie? Are we supposed to feel sympathy for a character we've never known before? I don't know. I figured the whole purpose of this movie was to pit science against nature and show that nature always wins. But no, it isn't. I've seen similar plots in Jacob's Ladder and Stay, done much better and much more effectively. The setup and pay-off in those films actually worked, with the whole premise of those movies being the ability for the character who are dying to come to terms with their lives, their mistakes, their guilt, and their deaths. That makes those movies beautiful, but makes this one a jumble. While it has some of those elements, they're not the focus of the movie.

Yes, there are certainly things that could be interpreted as a death dream. The mother is both antagonistic and a true scientist. She never does anything truly evil even if she is completely unethical. She's portrayed much more as a purveyor of science than as a monster. Which, if Miyuki's memories of her mother is correct, she might very well be cold, distant, and more interested in her work than her family. Kaori is portrayed as weak, ineffectual, and easily manipulated. She sleeps with Miyuki's boyfriend, which could be a critical thought about the two of them. Miyuki was more than likely unhappy with her relationship with both of them, and the interpretation of both of them breaking her trust seems like a reasonable thought for her to have, especially in a depressed and dying state of mind. memories of an old house and her apartment would also fit, being the places she would have remembered very well.

But there are so many things that don't fit with the premise of this being a death-dream. Why the comedic antics of the mother's helpers? Why the Rieko being afterlife pregnant? These elements do not work into the plot very well. I guess that's all I can really say.

I think some people have a pretty vitriolic feeling about this movie. I mostly find it an interesting failure. I liked the beginning and ending, but the middle felt overlong and tiring. It seriously almost put me to sleep. I was nodding off. The CGI was garbage, but the whole afterlife plot was interesting with the ending of the film making some sense even if it was not well set up earlier in the movie. The acting was pretty decent, and the filming of scenes was fine. I didn't really see any big issues with those things.

I didn't like the music, finding it distracting at times. The plot is dense, convoluted, and nonsensical at times. It really needed somebody to come along and say something about it. The tone of the film is everywhere, and I guess I was expecting a much different movie. It was bad per se, but it certainly wasn't good either. It's not scary either, so if you really want a scary movie, this isn't it. Again the comparison to Dreamland holds up pretty well. There are fairly similar problems in both. I think I like that movie more, but only because that one is seriously unique in terms of literally everything about it.

I can't recommend this movie to watch. It is a mess of a film that makes little to no sense at times. It had it's interesting moments, but ultimately fails the coherency test.

Movie Appraisal: Retribution (Sakebi) (叫) (Scream) (Shriek) (2006)

Well, that was a movie I did not enjoy. While it is the fourth movie in the J-Horror Theater series of movies, and it is directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, it just does not do enough to be interesting. I was quite fond of 2001's Kairo but this movie just does not deliver on many of the same fronts that other better horror movies have. I found this movie to be very slow, something I usually like, but also just kind of odd in places. It was so slow as to become very dry and somewhat boring, and it never really did anything. The shots were sterile, the plot was fairly dull and predictable, and the acting, something I usually praise, was subpar.

The confusing plot did not help this film. And it's not as if the plot isn't spelled out either, but the confusion is more about why everything is happening the way it does. Why does the lady in red's ghost seem so powerful? She's so powerful that she can bring about the deaths of everyone? I mean, that's the point, right? That's ridiculous. I know it's also the ending, but even before that, I found little about this movie to like.

Most of the characters do not work for me. They never feel real or emotional. They never feel like people. They feel like set-pieces and window-dressing. The acting made me bored out of my skull as well. I'm not looking for overly complex screaming and emotional acting, but there has to be something more than what was given. The shots of the actors were so sterile and separate from the movie as well that I found it very hard to relate to those characters. It was incredibly disappointing because I went into this movie with a great deal of hope for something compelling.

Anyway, the plot is basically about a detective following a murder case (and eventually a string of murder cases) that involves drowning in sea water. It is very procedural, trying to find the suspect, and the detective being his own prime suspect for a while, which just kind of goes nowhere and is really dumb. He eventually starts seeing what he thinks is the murdered girl's ghost, but it isn't. It's just another girl in a red dress who happens to be a ghost. It just feels very silly and very uninteresting.

The movie is never scary. The red dress ghost is simply kind of goofy looking. She never looks like she belongs in a single scene. It doesn't work, whatever they did in the shooting of this film, and it makes the whole premise not only ridiculous but really bland as well. You can tell that they wanted to create a new horror icon about a creepy girl, but a ninety pound young woman will never be scary, okay? Horror movies, do you understand that? Young women are not scary by themselves just staring or saying weird things. You have to have more than that. Give me some tension or show me less or something.

I simply want to sigh and stop talking about this movie. I did not enjoy it in the slightest. I think others might, but for me the plot and the premise were too silly for me to take seriously. And without any scares this is hardly a horror movie. I've seen others place it in a mystery movie category, but even that's not right because so much of this movie isn't mystery so much as "Oh, we forgot to tell you major plot points!" I mean, the detective's girlfriend just happened to be murdered six months previous despite her having appeared in three-quarters of the movie seemingly perfectly fine. Why even do that? It just makes the whole thing needlessly complex. I get that the whole movie is basically an apocalyptic scenario over collective guilt or whatever, but it's so badly portrayed. It doesn't work on so many levels. And while I tend to like slow-burning horror, this movie has so many convenient excuses for plot that it bordered on actual bad plot writing.

I think many people might enjoy this one, but I certainly did not. I wholly do not recommend this movie, and would actively tell people to avoid it. There are some decent scenes here and there, but nothing interesting enough to recommend the whole movie. The music (and lack thereof at times) is fairly well done. And... I guess I really did like one scene, when the detective's partner disappears or is dragged into a bowl of water. It was well done. And it was perhaps the only scene that was.

It's disappointing to me because I found Kairo so compelling. It was a movie I remembered for years and years, and this movie will go down in my mind and my review as a forgettable and jumbled mess.

Movie Appraisal: Premonition (Yogen) (予言) (2004)

I love horror movies because of what they can do when they are spot on. A good horror movie won't just scare you, it will make you a wreck of a person. Once you get into a horror movie, really experience it, it can become a transcendent incident unto itself. That probably makes no sense. Let me put it this way: if a good horror movie can scare you, a great one will be a lingering fear within you for the rest of your life. You will think back on it as things happen in your daily life. It will become a part of you just as easily as the bad or mediocre horror movies are forgotten memories, only dredged up if you actively think about that certain movie.

Yogen, or Premonition to us English speakers, is such a movie. I don't even have words for what i just watched. I mean, yes, I'll write down a ton of words, but none of them will be a meaningful as my reactions as I watched this movie. Very few movies make me react viscerally to them. I can only tick off a few: Possession from 1981, Jacob's Ladder, 1408,  and that's about it. I mean, I'm sure there are a couple of others that I'm simply not remembering, but this movie... this movie was brilliant in every sense of the word.

It was not shot as a horror movie, and with most of the film being setup, it had very few moments of actual horror. But when those moments popped up it certainly hit me in a very visceral way. I was shocked at some of the things that happen in this movie, and not simply jump-scare shocked, but truly horrified at what happens. It is a slow-burn of a movie, even at only about an hour-and-a-half long. It feels like a much longer film.

As I said before, most of the movie is setup. It establishes the rules of this movie universe. It sets up the whole idea of fate, and that some people seem to be "gifted" to see what could happen in the future, or in this case, who will die and how. And these are not peaceful deaths either, but deaths of a violent and often very sudden nature. While we see very little of the actual deaths and dying, the ones that we do get to see are awful, really be benchmarks in how to film a death in a horror movie.

But would I even call this a horror movie? I was certainly shocked and horrified, but horror doesn't rightly describe this film. It is a film about terror, about trying to understand the workings of the universe and being completely unable to do so in any meaningful way. It is a film that shockingly states that there is very little we can do against the universe, and in the end we can only truly somewhat control our own fate and nothing else.

The movie is about a man, an overworked, very stressed out man named Hideki, who needs to send an email to his work, but that decision ultimately leads to his daughter being killed in a car accident. And that accident is so sudden that it literally shocked me out of my seat. His life turns into a mess. He loses, or gives up, his wife. And his whole demeanor changes. It doesn't change because his daughter dies though. It changes because he sees, or thinks he sees, a newspaper article concerning her death before she dies. He does nothing, and his guilt is what drives a wedge between his wife and himself, and basically everybody else as well.

Over time he starts seeing more of these newspapers around, foretelling deaths and terrible things. And he continues to do nothing about it. He doesn't try to change anything.He simply gets freaked out and doesn't want to deal with it. Then, when he sees a student of his in his newspaper of fate, getting stabbed to death, he tries to get involved, only to be too late to save her.

The movie moves on as we see his ex-wife, Ayaka, researching the phenomena he has been experiencing to try to grasp what is actually going on. Eventually, as she finds a psychic photograph of Hideki taken by a psychic person she had been working with who seemed to have died, possibly violently? It's never really shown how or why. Anyway, she starts to believe him, tries to talk with him, and eventually does. They team up to try to solve the mystery of what's happening only to find a great deal more than they would have expected.

It is a movie that goes through many twists and turns. Those who can see the future as he does are cursed. Either they go mad and die if they do not help the people in the newspapers out or they blacken and shrivel away like some sort of living spectre if they do warn those people and save their lives. So, it's a no-win situation. Hideki has chosen up to this point to do nothing, but when his ex-wife, whom he has become close to again, is mentioned dying in an article about a train derailment, he chooses to save her, thus damning himself. He changes her fate and that changes his as well.

The end of the movie is a cerebral turn that jumps from one memory to another. It is dreamlike, and called Hell by another character who is experiencing it... or who has. It's unclear exactly how much of it is real or really happening. This is the most terrifying and upsetting part of the movie, and the part that will probably be make or break for most people. It never seems to "really" be happening, but at the same time it is a part of the movie, and the most important part at that. I connected with the characters, really seeing them as beautiful pieces put into this film. They work well, and the ending works well because that added effort was put into making them as good as possible.

Anyway, in the end, Hideki chooses to sacrifice himself so that both his daughter and wife will live. And it is shown that that is his choice, but also somewhat his fate. The psychic picture of him was of his death photograph in the newspaper at the end of the movie that his daughter sees. So, how much of the end of the movie was his choice and how much was his fate is certainly up in the air, at least to me.

I don't really know what else to say. The movie is amazing from beginning to end. The music is wonderful when it actually happens. The filmography is well done. The acting is brilliant and believable with the actors being one of the biggest highlights of the viewing experience. The plot is well done, based on a manga "Kyoufu Shinbun" ("Newspaper of Terror) by Jiro Tsunoda published in 1973, and is certainly the best part of the film, so much so that... I just have no other words for it.

As for the director Norio Tusuruta, I had reviewed one of his other movies last year in fact. I did not like Kakashi very much and subsequently kind of eviscerated the movie for being a wishy-washy mess. Junji Ito films sadly tend to have that quality about them. This movie though, with its genuinely great script, great acting, great production quality, and great cinematography works on every level that Kakashi didn't. So much so that I basically want to apologize to Norio (even though I said I liked the directing of Kakashi) because this effort shows true quality that I have huge amounts of respect for.

This movie is also the second movie made in the J-Horror Theater series of movies, and that might be why the production values are so good.

Do I recommend this movie? Yes. Hell yes. Go see this movie whether or not you like Japanese horror. It is both a great movie and a great and viscerally upsetting horror movie. It deserves to be both watched and praised.

Also, since this is the first movie of the six J-Horror Theater movies that I've seen, and since it was so good, I've decided to check out the others in the series as well. Hopefully they keep up the quality.