Premonition (2004)

directed by Norio Tsuruta

Japan

95 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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I didn't expect much going into this due to the director never having made any movies I could describe more fondly than "lukewarm", but it had also been on my watchlist for so long without getting booted off even after I read some mediocre reviews that I figured there was probably a reason for that. I came away from this film with questions, not necessarily about the plot but about whether a movie can be not very good in some areas (and how many?) but still be, on the whole, good despite itself.

The opening of Premonition took me off guard, to say the least, because it is harrowing. Here I was expecting something corny, and instead I got a deeply upsetting depiction of parents losing their five-year-old daughter in a perfect storm of small events that lead up to a devastating auto crash. It's all well-acted and hits the right spot where everybody reacts realistically enough that you feel a little sick. Genuinely hair-raising. After the first ten minutes or so, I figured that even if the rest of the movie was garbage, I had to at least give it credit for an opening that was seriously unsettling. It's like when Gage dies in Pet Sematary, only stretched out over minutes and revisited several times over the course of the film.

I was also surprised at how strongly this film wears its Kiyoshi Kurosawa influence on its sleeve. I feel confident in saying that director Norio Tsuruta was doing this deliberately, because... come on. It feels so obvious. It's not just a matter of a dingy, dank atmosphere, it's the specific details of it: People move through a homogenous landscape while disastrous events just happen to them over and over, as they appear to be at the mercy of a cruel and unfeeling universe that manipulates them using forces beyond their imagining. Everyone speaks quietly when they're not shrieking in mortal terror and heartbreak. Most everything about this movie is quiet in some way, like everybody is stuck in a well of despair that dampens all sound. It's nihilistic as well as personally affecting.

Hiroshi Makami is really good in the lead role. He looks like if Brad Dourif were Japanese. His character is very emotional, and he plays it really well, does a good job of imparting a sense of actual instability to the protagonist that goes beyond what a lot of other movies with a main character who never overcame some past grief typically do. He doesn't feel okay. He doesn't even feel like he's hiding not being okay very well. And it's not in a fashionably disheveled way, it's not cute or hip. This guy just really seems to not be doing good and it's central to his identity.

It's somewhat difficult to reconcile the dead serious tone with the premise of this movie, which is a little wacky. I think maybe the premise goes at things too literally, and that works to its detriment, while the atmosphere hits it dead on. The title says just about everything you need to know, but the protagonist receives his premonitions of impending doom in the form of a physical newspaper that seems to manifest some kind of evil force, leering at him with grunts and groans and waving around as if animated from the inside. Honestly, from a subjective standpoint, I didn't mind this and even kind of liked it- there's something fun about it, the scary evil newspaper: it jives with the ultimate absurdity of the world this film takes place in. The protagonist seems to have stumbled upon some hidden compelling force of darkness, and why should that not manifest in a newspaper that lunges at his hands? Does what form fate takes really matter if we're forever just a pawn to it?

There's a lingering uncertainty to this that has uncomfortable real-world parallels if you do want to think deeper about it. Every one of us can experience burnout when we get too invested in the fact that every second of every day plays host to a new miniature catastrophe for somebody, somewhere in the world. The scale of suffering that unfolds unknown to us, only occasionally seeping through as a headline on a newspaper, is overwhelming. I think that's the dual message of this film, side-by-side with the personal tragedy of the main character: That becoming too obsessed with the ongoing devastation of human life will lead to you giving your whole self over to it and leaving nothing behind. The main character's final act when he becomes entirely unmoored and drifts through time might be a final instance of poking his head above the surface before he is made a casualty of the dark forces present throughout this film. I think the perfect word to describe this is spooky- the combo of a genuinely chilling atmosphere, but also something like that newspaper that's just a little bit silly, creates an effect that's only as frightening as you want to be frightened by it.