Carved: A Slit-Mouthed Woman (2007)

directed by Kôji Shiraishi
Japan
90 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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As frequently happens, this is a movie that I tried to watch several years back but fell asleep during, so it's like I was watching it for the first time this time around. I was kind of surprised upon re-visiting it because I actually feel like this is one of Kôji Shiraishi's better movies, and I thought I had watched all his good ones already. The man still can't end a film to save his life, though.

So for the uninitiated, Kuchisake-onna is an urban legend in Japan wherein a woman with a deep gash in her face will come up to you and ask if you think she's pretty; if you agree, she'll use giant scissors to make you look like her. If you disagree, she'll still just kill you. If you say "eh you're average" she'll get all flummoxed and let you alone. A lot of urban legends in Japan are like this- creatures that accost you with a trick question, but if you know the answer, you can get them to leave you on your merry way. Watching this movie, I was struck by how deeply the standard of being polite and using the right greetings and honorifics runs, and I feel like that might have something to do with the prevalence of this kind of riddle-based urban legend: it's sourced from the fear of saying/doing the wrong thing.

This movie looks at the urban legend from different perspectives and involves the characters' personal lives in the way they see the legend, which I think is what any good movie centered around folklore/legends/etc. should do. One man is tormented by hearing the slit-mouthed woman's taunts in his head, a little girl seems to almost think being taken by her would be preferable to staying with her abusive mother, et cetera. However after a while the film kind of devolves into just child abuse, child abuse, child abuse- and it doesn't get any of the nuances right or seem to think much deeper than just "mom hits kid, kid cries" which makes its portrayal of abuse feel rushed and unsympathetic at worst, and poorly thought-out at best. The theme of reconciliation is less about "I did this horrible thing to you and I'm sorry" than it is about "even if families are abusive they still need to stick together because that is the way families should be", even if it doesn't explicitly say that on the surface.

Carved also adds an interesting element to the urban legend's story in which the slit-mouthed woman becomes a kind of "curse" that can jump from person to person, as opposed to a single figure who stays the same throughout all encounters with her. Multiple women become the slit-mouthed woman. This is also a really neat way of depicting an urban legend because it shows it as a kind of archetype, which legends frequently are- less a being and more an idea of a being, surviving that way throughout the years because the concept of it can never die without a physical body.