The Witch in the Window (2018)

directed by Andy Mitton

USA

77 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I watched about five minutes of this when it first came out but then the stream cut out and I figured it was no great loss, because 2018 me was all about judging movies based on barely five minutes of them, I guess. But then I found out it was directed by one of the people who made one of my favorite movies ever, YellowBrickRoad, and I had to watch the rest to see if it was as good as I thought it would be. And it turns out it is.

The Witch in the Window isn't about the witch. Not really. The film begins as a standard new-house horror with several standard tropes: a divorced dad struggling to relate to his son, who actually loves him despite the tough-kid front he puts up; a fixer-upper house that promises to become a money pit; a mystery neighbor who knows more about the house than he lets on. And so on and so forth. But the movie isn't really about any of these things either- it's one of the most interesting takes on a ghost story that I've seen thus far, and the way it handles its ghost and the subsequent reactions of its characters to its ghost is genuinely one of the only times I've seen anything do it that way.

When the dad and son see the witch, they don't see her as an ethereal, filmy apparition, or as a nightmare in a mirror, or any of the other typical ways one might expect to see a ghostly witch. They see her full-bodied, solid, corporeal, sitting in a chair gazing out the window. Which is all in line with the ghost witch urban legend attached to the house... but nobody who's retold the legend has ever gotten as close to her as the father and son do. When they see her, she looks like a fleshly person, but their phones don't show her on camera- quite the opposite of the usual story, where someone snaps a spook in a selfie and then hyperventilates as they whip their head around and see nothing there behind them. The witch is wholly a character in the film, not an antagonist filled with evil and driven to... antagonize, not a legend running on the tracks laid out for her by myth, unable to deviate. The witch is a resident of the run-down house who just happens to not be alive anymore. Seeing two people both walk up to a ghost and see her, fully, and discuss the fact that they are seeing a ghost without any doubt of it being a ghost, and then moving on with what that means- how it can be integrated into their knowledge of the world around them going forward- I don't think any other horror film has done that. It was exhilarating in a mundane way to see a movie where two characters willingly approach a ghost calmly.

The witch is definitely real, but she's also used as a way to talk about parent-child relationships. I don't mean this in a hackneyed, Lifetime Original Movie type of way; you could be forgiven for being super bored of "ugh I hate you mom and dad!" type kids on film because they seem to be a dime a dozen, but this movie is the real deal as far as exploring dysfunction between a parent and child and how it develops (and why). I mean, it's not a documentary about it, but it portrays it in a subtler and more realistic light than most things. There's one line when the dad says something like "I was given this perfect thing, you, and I look at you and think 'how could anyone give me this perfect thing without knowing that I would always find a way to wreck it?'" I think that encapsulates the self-loathing that goes into ruining a relationship due to insecurity. And the ending is a dark, bittersweet portrayal of the act of taking oneself out of the life of another because you believe they're better off without you. I can see that this has DNA from YellowBrickRoad, although it is more metaphorical and human than it. 

YellowBrickRoad (2010)

directed by Andy Mitton & Jesse Holland

USA

99 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I already knew that this was one of my favorite horror movies, but for some reason I never chose to revisit it until now. It is quite divisive and I would almost call it a cult film due to how much the people who do like it like it. The people who don't like it seem to think it's "trying too hard" or maybe just poorly made, and I mean... I'm not going to get into the high value I place on subjectivity and the audience's interpretation of film, so even though I disagree with both of those points, I do have to respect them. But what if we stopped thinking of honestly-made films as "trying too hard"? What if we thought of them as just... trying?

So the movie is about a documentary crew following the story of an entire town that walked off into the sunset in 1940 and was never seen again. They're joined by a local woman who wants to see the trail for herself after hearing the stories, despite also hearing from the present-day townspeople that the trail is bad news. There's kind of a callback to the old urban legend of the Lost Colony of Roanoke here with how the entire town disappeared after carving a "mysterious" word into a rock, but I don't know if that was intentional. The references to The Wizard of Oz don't really have much to do with anything either other than creating a motif, but I think that connecting the events of "real life" (as depicted in the film) to both a strange disappearance and a fictional movie makes everything that happens seem more dreamlike and bizarre.

I've already typed two paragraphs while struggling to figure out how to actually describe this movie. I'm gonna have to use my old fallback of saying that there's just something off about it. As soon as the film crew begins to retrace the footsteps of the missing townspeople, they enter into the uncanny. The trail is both there and not there- a road named "Yellow Brick Road" that doesn't actually have any yellow bricks, a trail that isn't much more than a tamped-down region of what is otherwise just forest and grass. At one point, under the sway of the locale, one of the crew members says "When you look right, when you look left, the land moves like... liquid." This is not just a case of mass hysteria that drove the town to walk down the trail and out of existence. There's something about the land that subsumes the people who enter it. I just recently watched the film adaptation of Annihilation, and the tone of this movie is what I wish Annihilation had managed to capture- looking at a place and knowing that, even though it looks like normal woodland, under the surface there's something incompatible with human biology there. We never find out what drove the people to walk or what made them disappear, but it's enough to know the land did it somehow. Maybe the people in 1940 were after a group of people who disappeared before them. Maybe the land loops back forever.

The interesting thing about all this is that there aren't any special effects outside of some necessary gore. The viewer doesn't see what the film crew is experiencing, and other than being able to hear the constant disembodied music that drives some of them out of their minds, all we have to go on to distinguish the trail from a regular hiking trail is the words and actions of the crew. The most memorable scene in the film is when one of the crew, for petty reasons, suddenly just rips another crew member's leg off. I think that scene is the first time when it's really emphasized how powerful the force of the trail is, and it's unexpected enough to make me remember it years later. And hey, fun fact- the guy who rips the girl's leg off and the girl who gets her leg ripped off are brother and sister in real life!

I apologize for getting so wordy about movies that I like, but there's no way to succinctly describe the exact tone of YellowBrickRoad without getting the person you're describing it to to watch it first, and even with everything I've written, I feel like I haven't scratched the surface. I almost want to call this ecological horror, because the setting is inseparable from the story. I just can't get enough of horror movies like this that are about some deeply strange event that is never explained, never rationalized, just experienced fully & bodily by the people involved. More horror movies should do less explaining. We could do with more weird.

The Beach House (2020)

directed by Jeffrey A. Brown

USA

88 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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This is a surprisingly smart movie- surprising because it doesn't start out that way. It begins with the classic horror set-up of a girl and her mediocre-at-best boyfriend on a beach getaway. Add in a truly baffling sequence where, for no reason, the boyfriend gets two middle-aged family friends who show up at the cabin astronomically high on some edibles, and you've got something that, on paper, shouldn't have been nearly as good as it was. But The Beach House is a rare instance of a body horror movie that takes a lot of care in developing its body horror element, and it's totally absent of any kind of pandering and dumbing itself down. The most prominent voice is the girlfriend's character, who is capable and savvy and not forced to be bubbly and sexy the way so many horror film girlfriends are. Her presence as an astrobiologist-in-training lends an important weight to the events of the film that so many others like it lack.

I didn't know anything about this before getting into it, and I expected it to be way ickier. The way it goes about body horror is a lot subtler than you'd expect, but it still does retain that ever-valuable slime factor. I guess there's kind of a spectrum to these things- on one end are films that are soaked in blood and corn syrup, with ropey guts hanging everywhere and everybody's hair plastered down by goo, and on the other end you've got things that focus more on the psychological aspect of alienation from your own body and only supplement it here and there with practical effects. The Beach House falls somewhere in the middle of all that. There is still goo and more than enough of it to make you deeply uncomfortable, but it's used only when it has to be. There's no shortage at all of scenes that are upsetting, like one where the main character has to pull a worm out of her foot, but the horror is mainly delivered through the sense of something being wrong. I'm not sure if it was deliberate or not, but this reminded me a lot of John Carpenter's "The Fog" in how there's fog (duh) but also in how it feels like what's happening is more important and more dangerous than the characters can see for themselves most of the time.

This feeling of wrongness is somewhat rare in body horror. Like I said, usually you get one or the other; corn syrup blood and naked girls screaming or philosophical treatises on the decay of the flesh. Both are not usually combined like this, to create something engaging and unique, and most of all unsettling.

There's so many smaller details about this that create a big picture, and I want to talk about some of those, but both are spoilers, so beware. The first is when the environment begins to degrade and we see what looks like giant dumplings made of flesh washing up on shore in great numbers- for some reason, when I first saw those, before I registered that they were just weird alien sacs, I thought they were dead human bodies. Then I thought- what if they were dead bodies? That would be such a disturbing detail, if people who were in the ocean at the time were turned into disgusting flesh blobs. 

The second thing happens at the very end of the film and is very ambiguous: we see the main character transformed in the same way as her doomed boyfriend, muttering "don't be scared, don't be scared" over and over. That phrase is such a weird thing for her to be saying after she's been decimated by an unknown life-form, and it can be interpreted in a lot of ways. I like to think that as an aspiring astrobiologist, some small corner of herself would have been fascinated by the idea of becoming one with another life-form, and her saying that is her attempt to calm herself down after no other avenues of survival as a human were left to her. But it could also have been the parasite controlling her and forcing her to say things that it thought would enable it to get closer to, and infect, other humans. Just enough is left to the imagination about The Beach House to keep it interesting but just enough is explained to make it accessible, and it's a really great summer watch for people who hate the outdoors. Gooey movies are the vibe this summer.

Relic (2020)

directed by Natalie Erika James

Australia

88 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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This has garnered a lot of praise recently, and the general consensus seems to be that it's not only unsettling in the terms usually associated with the horror genre, but also on a more personal level. It's about three generations of women all together in one house after the oldest of them goes missing inexplicably, turns up again, and seems to have something... off about her. This is not a movie where you have to figure out if something is genuinely wrong with a person or if they're experiencing supernatural events- both of those things are very clearly the case here.

Relic is scary because of the inherent wrongness of seeing someone you love, someone you've known your whole life, behave in ways totally alien to how you're used to. It's also scary because you get the impression of what it might be like to be that person, and to deal with not only your own mind but also your life being invaded by some sinister presence that you can't name. And everyone outside of it just thinks you're developing dementia. The film is overlaid with what some would call an "Instagram filter", giving every scene what would otherwise be a warm, autumnal tone, a tone suited to pictures of young people posing in cozy libraries and against orangey leaves, but what, in this case, just feels like damp and mold. This is a movie you can practically feel while you watch it- the dankness of the grandmother's house, the dimness of it, the sense of decay. All this movie is is decay, in all its forms. It's a movie about slowly rotting away inside your own memory and becoming dead to the world through the loss of those memories. It isn't a light-hearted watch, especially if you're currently stuck inside and scrutinizing every spot on the baseboards of your own living space.

Like I said, there is absolutely a real force at play in this movie, it isn't a case of everything being in a person's head. But that force is still wielded as a metaphor for familial pain and its passage downward. I'm going to directly talk about the ending here, so be advised to skip this paragraph if you haven't seen the film, although as it doesn't really have twists and turns, I'm not sure how much I can spoil it. The final scene of this film- regardless of how I felt that the film in general was good, bordering on great, but not quite at the top of my list for the year- is one of the most affecting scenes in a horror movie I've seen this year. It is a literal portrayal of the process of readying yourself for the death of a parent. The middle generation is literally stripping away the skin of her mother, allowing her mother to shed the burden of being the caregiver and allowing herself to let go of the burden of caring. She's preparing the way for the youngest generation to gradually begin taking her place. The tone of the film is deeply sinister, but I think there's more than just malice here- unless it's the general malice of time, taking everything away in the end and making people into nothing but skin sacks, replicas of themselves. As I said, it's an upsetting film. It deals with heavy things.

Oddly enough, though, as upsetting as this is, it's not something I got so drawn up into that I had a hard time escaping it. I don't know if this is the mark of a film that fails to reach its goal or if it's a testament to how the end message of the film is one of inevitability and moving on, so that I didn't feel the need to dwell on it but instead recognized its themes as something we all eventually need to process. This is a great example of why I return, over and over, no matter what, to the horror genre: Because the tropes of horror can be used to explore pain that we continually need to reinvent new ways to talk about.

High Life (2018)

directed by Claire Denis

France, Germany, Poland, UK, USA

113 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I decided to watch this movie because I recently watched another film (Aniara) that a lot of people were comparing to High Life, and I wanted to see something else with a similar vibe. High Life is the more popular one of the two, I think, so forgive me for how much I'm going to be comparing and contrasting the two despite their having nothing to do with each other- comparing this to Aniara gives me at least some kind of starting point, otherwise I really don't know how to talk about this movie. And anyway, I personally didn't find the two to be very much alike at all; they are both good but with different moods.

The basic framework is, I suppose, similar: in High Life, the crew of a ship launched on a one-way mission to a black hole knows that they're going to die, and are on the mission because they are all criminals back on Earth and were offered a chance to get out of jail in exchange for giving their lives (eventually) to science. In Aniara, the people aboard the ship didn't anticipate to be drifting in empty space forever, but both crews experience loneliness acutely and existentially. There are also only two survivors in High Life, whereas in Aniara it's an ensemble of people who are alive right up until the very end. High Life leaves me confused about whether or not the message was that there is always hope in the end- on the one hand, the journey of the main character to a point where he's relatively tranquil, even as the last survivor on a mission that was intended to kill everyone anyway, is filled with the senseless illogic of human behavior, but on the other hand, look how serene everything is in the end. I think, more than anything, High Life is a movie about entropy. All other noise is gradually eliminated until a balance is obtained.

Juliette Binoche's character seems to be the embodiment of the hand of chaos touching the crew, but that entropy factor also seems to be working through her, so that everything she influences, while initially knocked out of its orbit and given over to total unpredictability, eventually submits to elimination to make way for the final symbiotic balance of the main character and his daughter. She influences everyone to turn them against their desires. Don't want to give birth to a child? We'll see about that. Stepping out of the fertility program for personal reasons? As if, we'll harvest your genes anyway. She revels in the bucking of plans, physically revels in it, and despite her ostensible role as a doctor, is no less a criminal than the rest of the crew- just one with more of a sense of outward physical decorum. A certain scene of hers seems to directly be inspired by the famous painting "Witches Going to Their Sabbath".

Towards the end of the film, the main character and his daughter drift by another of their ship, presumably part of the same program meant for the same goal. He docks with it and boards it only to find that the ship, after over a decade of being alone, is full of feral dogs, mostly dead or diseased. This feels like the most perfect metaphor possible for the actions of the humans on the main ship. Is there a difference between the unchecked lives of animals running with no interference for years and the lives of humans who, despite the illusion of humanity and free will, all eventually succumb to the driving force of their in-built destinies?

The aesthetics of this film are also very interesting, especially as Claire Denis has not been known for sci-fi until now. It has a really 70s feel with the amount of fabrics and the heavily orange and beige color scheme, and I'm glad that they went for something that felt like an outdated office building roaming the cosmos rather than the sterility of a typical spacecraft. This almost felt not like a spaceship at all at some points, and more like a stage for a play that was configured to represent a spaceship. When the main character disposes of bodies out the hatch, they fall straight downward into blackness (probably due to their proximity to a black hole?) rather than drifting weightlessly. It's hard to imagine the ship as actually being in space, it feels more like it's suspended in some infinite empty room on invisible wires. I also love any film with an unusual aspect ratio, so I appreciated that in this. I really don't have any idea what this movie as a whole is supposed to represent- I only have theories. It's certainly something that warrants thinking about.

Aniara (2018)

directed by Hugo Lilja, Pella Kågerman

Sweden

106 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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It's interesting to me that I didn't even think about this as a "generation ship" story until I looked up other peoples' reviews, even though it is the literal definition of one. Aniara is a film about a very large transport ship meant to ferry people from Earth to Mars that gets thrown off-course and begins drifting aimlessly through space for decades, meaning children will be born and people will die on the ship. I didn't think about it as a generation ship because typically those kinds of stories entrust the future generations with some kind of duty- in Aniara, all hope of being able to steer the ship back onto some kind of viable course is well out the window by the time people begin having new children. But I guess optimism is not a requirement of generation ships; there simply has to be generations onboard, whether they have a purpose or are careening through the stars without hope. I'm surprised that the trope is not explored in a more existentially heavy context like this film more often.

Something that I admire about this is that it has undertones of a critique of consumerism but doesn't entirely place the blame on individuals, or at least it doesn't present them as being irredeemably bad for buying into consumerism. It doesn't make fun of people for finding themselves complacent in a society that's designed to make them that way. The ship really feels uncannily like a large commercial airline at the start- they managed to replicate perfectly the feeling of being in an airport and being unable to move two feet without having somebody try to sell you something. The gloss, the proud display of wealth and the implicit assumption that the money required to travel in luxury admits you to some kind of exclusive club, the public-facing airline staff and their alienating displays of attempted down-to-earthness (or down-to-Marsness in this case) are all recognizable despite a futuristic setting. The plastickiness and high-end fakery of the ship Aniara is half as depressing as the degradation that comes afterward.

Most of this film is actually not terribly futuristic by today's standards- like I said, it just looks like a fancy airline, but in space- but there's one high-concept element that I felt was possibly the most intriguing thing, and I wish there had been more of it. I'm talking about the presence of some kind of strange entity on the ship, an alien or AI or something else entirely, referred to as Mima- she inhabits a room that the passengers can enter to experience full-body memories of their time on Earth, and the mechanism of this is not explained at all. Visually she's represented by a roiling screen on the ceiling of a large padded room with a golden glow, and I don't know if this was intentionally modeled after the ocean/planet/mind in Solaris, but that's what it looked like. The entity interacts with peoples' thoughts and eventually this becomes too much for her, and she self-destructs in a moment that was very potent and prescient of the events to come- she simply can't handle the burden of human thought, the sheer weight of everyone's grief at once. I even thought the name was interesting, how it's similar to so many things: Mima sounds like memory, mimic, and of course mama, or "my ma".

Emilie Jonsson's character doesn't even get a name outside of her association with Mima- she works as a sort of go-between for people overwhelmed by their connection with the entity, a position referred to as "Mimaroben"- but her performance is the highlight of the film. There is a specific scene that I can't mention because it constitutes a big spoiler where her grief feels so real it hurt to hear. I think grief is an ever-present theme of this film, how people process it and cope with it long-term, and whether you even can cope with it long-term. It's about the impossibility of living without knowing when things will change, or if they ever will. There's only so many words I can use to describe Aniara because it's so meditative, it's something you feel deeply or you don't feel at all. It is not quite as experimental as I thought it would be for some reason, but it's got such a melancholy undercurrent that I'm going to be thinking about it for a long time.

Crawl (2019)

directed by Alexandre Aja

Canada, Serbia, USA

88 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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The storm movie is a niche subgenre that I feel is not explored enough. It's something that almost integrates itself into real life, and that's really interesting. I like the concept of movies that are watched at specific times, when conditions are right. I actually waited until the weather in my area was nasty enough that Crawl would feel appropriate, and it was much more immersive that way.

The other subgenre that Crawl belongs to has much less to offer in the way of exploring human experience, and that subgenre is the croc flick. Crocsploitation, if you will. I know Crawl deals with alligators, not crocodiles, but the physical distinction between the two really doesn't make a difference in how croc movies vs. gator movies are handled, except that they might take place in different locations. I was actually very surprised at how seriously Crawl takes itself for a croc movie; I wasn't expecting this from Alexandre Aja. I'd say that maybe Sam Raimi's involvement influenced the tone of the film, but... ditto for him. I was extremely thankful for this movie's mature tone, no matter who gets the credit for it. The blood is kept to a minimum and the result feels like a lot of people could enjoy it, instead of solely those who specifically enjoy gory movies.

I think the best thing about this movie is that it feels like it's going to last. It only came out last year and I already feel like it's something I've watched a bunch of times (in a good way). The "beats" of a cult classic are all there, and instead of feeling overused, the steps the characters go through that follow the steps of characters in every other disaster movie feel, in this case, like rites of passage. The arrival of potential rescuers only for them to be drawn into the chaos as well. The many points of tension and uncertainty when you feel that someone is an inch away from death. The main character's cycle of self-doubt that becomes confidence at the pivotal moment. One specific scene of bodily harm that marks a turn after which everything becomes more dire- the arm scene, in this case, which was totally not okay. All of this is done with remarkable restraint. And when I think about this movie compared to others typically considered disaster movie staples, I'm just really happy that the protagonist is a capable young woman whose worth and talent is not tied to her physical appearance. The women in older disaster movies are usually relegated to side roles and eye candy. This is something where a woman holds her own the entire time.

I guess the only real problem I had with this is the same thing that bothers me with any killer animal movie, which is the inherent fact that most of the time, the animal in question just isn't that aggressive in real life. Alligators don't really attack humans, we're too big for them to deal with. There was potential to introduce logic when a scene in Crawl shows a nest of alligator eggs in the house the characters are trapped in, because alligators will attack humans who interfere with their eggs, but this doesn't explain why even when the people get outside and are just out in the open floodwaters, the gators are still attracted to them like magnets. I feel like a hungry gator in a storm has easier targets, like fleeing animals, to go after. Why go after the screaming monkey that keeps bashing you in the eye?

Those lapses of realism are necessary to create something worth watching- we don't watch Armageddon for blueprints to build a space mission off of. I do worry, like with any killer animal film, that things like this will induce people to harm animals who've done nothing but exist with large teeth. But Crawl is a good time, plain and simple- a crocsploitation flick that doesn't feel like exploitation.

Dolls (1987)

directed by Stuart Gordon

USA

77 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I will be the first to admit to the overuse of creepy dolls in horror, but my main problem with the trope is its lazy deployment in recent horror as a fallback for when nothing better can be thought of. The doll in horror has a long history that is much deeper than Annabelle or even Chucky. But Dolls is not a movie about evil dolls- it's a movie about child abuse.

At the center of this movie is a little girl named Judy and her horrible stepmother and equally horrible biological father, and while it's not really unusual for a movie to portray a child as being the only person who really understands what's going on, it is unusual for something to be this unflinching about depicting abuse, and that's why I was surprised at this. I'm not talking about a depiction of abuse that's overtly graphic- there's no physical torture shown here at all (thankfully). I'm talking about a disturbingly accurate portrait of parents who just don't like their kid and are very vocal about it. The sort of casual disdain we see every day: parents talking about wanting to ship their kids off somewhere else; treating their children like grown adults who don't have any rational reason to act the way they do; not providing any sympathy or comfort; invalidating everything they say- it's all here, and it is not played for laughs, nor is it played for pity. A balance is struck between making abuse into a joke and casting Judy as the poor, pitiful waif; this balance is not often seen even in good movies, much less in a Charles Band film. Stuart Gordon I can believe would make something like this, so it's not that strange, but the presence of Band's name still gives me some whiplash when I consider that I haven't seen even serious drama films be so honest in showing abuse.

I feel like I'm over-emphasizing the abuse as a plot point here when the whole purpose of it is really just that it's an ongoing thing that Judy is so used to she doesn't even really react to it. When the family arrives at the weird creepy house full of dolls and old people, Judy doesn't immediately treat it with the jaded suspicion her parents go through life with- she just sees friends! And because of her willingness to empathize with these creations, these small, seemingly helpless things who just want to be loyal to humans, she earns protection that the adults, dismissing anything belonging to children as worthless, do not have. All of the adults in this movie are so wrapped up in their own lives that they forget to see anything outside of themselves, except maybe Ralph, and even he has to be shown by Judy how to act before he can recapture something of how he was as a child.

And regardless of the fact that Dolls is more caring about children than a thousand other movies of its ilk, it's also a genuinely great movie. I apologize for resorting to just saying that there's Something About This Movie the way I often do when I can't quite explain all the ways something is good, but there's just something about this movie. I don't know how to say it. It is good instead of bad. The blind woman from Don't Look Now is in it. Some of how fond I was of this movie might come from the fact that I collected dolls when I was younger and my collection looked very close to the doll rooms in the film, but the effects are half or even 75% of why this is so enjoyable. Again, I can't explain them if you've never seen them, other than to say that this is some of the best stop-motion work I've ever seen. The dolls look one hundred percent real. The way they move is so fluid, and their facial expressions! I still don't understand how they got their faces to move like that. They're not uncannily glossy and seamless in the way that CGI would enable them to be, they move like real humans do. I think that might be why the stop-motion is so good: they managed, somehow, to make a doll movie without leaning on the uncanny valley effect, so that instead of being creepy imitations of life, the dolls just look... alive.

Marebito (2004)

directed by Takashi Shimizu

Japan

92 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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Re-watch because I'm back on my Shinya Tsukamoto train. 

I did not remember much about this except that it had really creeped me out the first time around, and while I still do appreciate it and enjoy it, it didn't have the same effect of fear on me upon revisiting it. This is interesting because it is a movie entirely about fear, fear motivates all of the main character's actions and the major theme is exploring fear, but it's also remarkably flat and toneless. It's strange to watch something where we rely on voice-over narration to explain the protagonist's feelings because he doesn't really show them when the camera is on him. I think I liked it- I wouldn't have felt as engaged with Marebito had they employed some guy who would overact and be conspicuously afraid all the time as opposed to Tsukamoto who kept cool 99% of the time while explaining his motives and thoughts through voice-over.

This film was directed by Takashi Shimizu, of The Grudge fame. It seems to be borrowing from a ton of other films and literature to the point where it basically just feels like Shimizu's thesis project. Characters frequently go on at length about esoteric philosophical theories and occult works. I believe that this was made for love of the medium and a need to express and explore certain avenues of thought, because it's such a ridiculously obtuse movie that it can't have hoped to find audience with the populace at large (although maybe Japan's public is better equipped to casually watch movies about hollow earth theory than we are, who knows).

The things that Marebito borrows from, to name some of them directly, seemed to me to be: the concept of a curse transmissible by video, like The Ring; a lot of themes Kiyoshi Kurosawa uses such as the presence of an otherworld somewhere not quite outside of our world; a whoooooole lot of Lovecraft including literal, direct references to a lot of his works; and the aforementioned occult literature and conspiracy theories. The way the movie enacts these themes is kind of lacking- for the most part the characters just talk about them, and at one point we do get to see into an extremely poor CGI version of Agartha mixed with the Mountains of Madness spoken of by Lovecraft, but this is more of a "tell, don't show" thing. The whole idea is that the main character is obsessed with fear and figuring out what exactly people are seeing when they're so deeply frightened of some invisible force that they kill themselves over it, which to me is really, really similar to the whole idea of the cursed video tape in The Ring. Somehow this amounts to him exploring the Tokyo underground, emerging into ancient ruins, and rescuing a naked vampire girl who he then adopts and eventually starts murdering people to feed. Yeah I don't know either.

Don't expect answers here because there just aren't any. I really like this movie because it feels unafraid to just say a bunch of ideas and not connect them or wrap them up in any orderly fashion and like, honestly, half of the time when I write, I'm doing the same thing. It's heartening to know famous filmmakers do it too. Sometimes you just gotta get stuff out there. I love the aesthetic of this even though it's not as important as the ideas, the shot-on-video early-2000s Japanese horror look pioneered by Shimizu himself and Ringu (among others) is probably my favorite aesthetic for horror of all time.