Dir. Takashi Shimizu
2004
Made in conjunction with one of Tokyo’s film school’s and starring Shinya Tsukamoto, better known as a film director of Tetsuo: Iron Man, Marebito successfully marries Japanese grunginess with a particular brand of early 20th century Lovecraftian horror. It’s a relief to see that this was shot by the same director of (and at the same time as) the U.S. remake of The Grudge, and that Hollywood hasn’t gone to his head. Instead, this is a creepy, shot-on-several-kinds-of-video story.
Masuoka (Tsukamoto) is a freelance cameraman who captures a particularly gruesome suicide on camera. The victim’s last moments suggest a man overcome by fear. For Masuoka, who likes to hide behind his camera, he is attracted to being able to witness such terror in the flesh. Would it drive him mad, too? Of course, this is a question none of us may have ever encountered, but it sounds very familiar if you’ve read any Lovecraft, the “heroes” of such are always fulfilling a type of deathwish. The film even has a purplish voice-over–very H.P., that. Chiaki Konaka wrote the script based on his novel–Konaka wrote, among others, the anime Serial Experiments: Lain and Texhnolyze, which follow the same kind of mood.
So Masuoka descends into the tunnels under the Tokyo Subway and continues to go further and further down into the earth. This sequence is quite magical, with Masuoka meeting the suicide victim’s ghost, entering the “Mountains of Madness” (with a further name check to Richard Sharpe Shaver, who wrote about the hollow earth and the “Dero,” “Detrimental Robots” that torment those on the surface). He finds a young girl (Tomomi Miyashita), chained and naked, and returns with her to the surface.
But the glassy eyed girl has an appetite for blood, and soon Masuoka begins to indulge her. The second half may lose the solipsistic dementia of the first, but it still maintains that despairing mood particular to (some) Japanese horror, full of cramped, befouled apartment, alienating city life, a total absence of any moral code.
With the girl in his possession, mysterious strangers begin to follow Masuoka. One is a heavyset man with a deep voice who comes from the underworld. The other is a woman claiming that the girl is actually their daughter. Marebito offers levels of reality, but as we are stuck inside the man’s head, no one way is chosen. The ending is as ambiguous as it is unnerving.
By the way, Chiaki Konaka has a website.