The Visitor in the Eye (1977)

directed by Nobuhiko Ôbayashi
Japan
100 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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So I'm a big fan of Nobuhiko Ôbayashi, and like most people, my favorite movie of his is Hausu, because it's also one of my favorite movie in general. But he's also directed a substantial amount of short films that more closely follow the conventions of Japanese new-wave cinema, as well as some advertising work. I like to watch his shorts when I have nothing else to do because I can be guaranteed they'll be good. But I'm less familiar with his other feature-length movies, like this one.

The Visitor in the Eye appears to be based on some kind of manga that I've never heard of, and as such I think there's a lot of characters who are inside jokes from the source material that I didn't get the full context behind. The main character in the manga looks to be the roguish, Phantom of the Opera-looking mad doctor (played by the always fantastic Jô Shishido!) who is brilliant and successful but kind of broody and weird. But to me, not having any knowledge of this manga, the main character in this movie looks to be a young girl who gets her eye put out in a tennis accident and, upon receiving a replacement cornea, begins to have strange visions.

I think the reason why people don't talk about this movie as much as Hausu is because, to be blunt, it really isn't as good. I was hoping I'd come away from this telling people about a virtually unknown second Ôbayashi masterpiece that was equally deserving of love as Hausu, but it's just not all that. I absolutely love the way it looks, the cinematography has that painted-backdrop feel to it, unique to Ôbayashi, where everything looks vaguely fake but in a deliberate and aesthetically pleasing way. There's random screams for no reason and less surreal imagery than you might expect, but again, this seems to be an adaptation, so the director may have had less room to work with when it came to creative license. But despite looking perfect, there's no getting over the fact that this is just boring for about 95% of its running time. The beginning is interesting enough, but in the middle it lapses severely into a weird love triangle between the girl, her mystery dream lover, and the girl her mystery dream lover killed, and it never recovers. Good if you like soap operas, not so good if you like Hausu.

It also makes me really, really uncomfortable that the doctor character in this has a little girl living with him who refers to herself as his wife despite clearly being maybe six years old. I kept trying to figure out a way in which this was not disgusting- maybe she's joking, she's doing that kid thing where kids insist they're really adults because how dare anybody treat them like babies; maybe she's supposed to be a grown woman with a little kid body. But there is like no way to parse that that makes it not awful. I don't feel so bad about disliking this because that's just such a gross and bizarre element that I didn't understand the purpose of.

Lemme also leave a link here to where you can watch a bunch of Nobuhiko Ôbayashi shorts for free, legally, in case you also need to pass some time. "Emotion" is probably the best and longest on there, and involves vampires.