Ju-rei: The Uncanny (2004)

directed by Koji Shiraishi
Japan
76 minutes
4.5 stars out of 5
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If I haven't mentioned this already: Koji Shiraishi is My Guy, that one director who I'll watch anything from no matter how obscure or how questionable the quality. He has a couple of movies that are just about pitch-perfect, and also some that are... less fortunate, but I love them all. Some of the poorer ones, I even like more than the better ones. And fortunately Ju-rei is one of the best.

I wasn't expecting this movie to be full of bizarre ennui, and yet it was. The opening scene stands out as striking in its absurdity: A group of four girls dance hip-hop style in front of a closed store window in the middle of the night, in perfect sync, for no real reason. I mean, presumably they're doing it to practice, but it just comes off, like I said, as girls dancing at night for no reason whatsoever. The tinny music, the lack of personalization with just the backs of the girls' heads facing the camera, the nighttime setting- I don't know why, but it feels like Something™.

The weird vibe of introspective dread doesn't stop there, either. The whole movie takes place on the cusp of something that feels decidedly horrific yet is only peeking over the horizon, much like the pair of ghostly white hands reaching over the side of the bed in one scene. It feels strangely like an epidemic is coming, like we're seeing a city slowly become gripped by some plague of horror, silently claiming its victims. The incidents all follow a single family and the people associated with them, but nevertheless it feels more widespread than that. It's a curse that doesn't stop once it's claimed one person. These are ghosts that hunger.

I don't think a single minute of this film takes place during the daytime hours, and that serves to provide the vast majority of its unsettling, uncomfortably "foreign" vibe. This isn't a pitch-black, "who's out there", can't-see-two-feet-in-front-of-you dark. This is city dark. Street lamps and lit apartments don't do much to dissuade the awareness that you're the only person out at that hour and no one is there if you need help.

The ghosts take after every single other Japanese yūrei movie ever, but who says that can't be creepy? Particularly frightening is a single-line insight into what happens to a person after those white hands drag them off beyond the end of the scene: somebody muttering about being taken "into the place with nothing...", a fate that rivals the distorted faces of victims of the Ringu curse in terrible implications. This movie will probably appeal more to people who already know that they like this type of Japanese horror, as opposed to those who are tired of it, but I recommend it because it has an ambiance that I really haven't seen anywhere else. This is as scary as the more famous Noroi: The Curse and much more compact.