Long Dream (2000)

directed by Higuchinsky

Japan

58 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I originally watched Long Dream a while ago but decided to give it another look since I'm in the middle of David Kalat's J-Horror book and it's making me nostalgic for movies I haven't seen in a decade. I have very fond memories of being in less-than-ideal situations during which I spent my free time reading volumes and volumes of Junji Ito - wasting an entire day reading Hellstar Remina in the spare room of my grandmother's apartment was a formative time for me. That being said, I don't remember Long Dream well enough to compare it to this film, so I'm going to leave that aside and focus on the movie alone.

Conceptually - and this is where it does owe a debt to the original Ito manga, of course - you can't really get more unsettling than this. The idea of people having "long dreams" where they live enormous chunks of time somewhere outside of physical reality while their bodies appear asleep to outside observers is downright horrifying. It starts with relatively small spans - a week, a month, a year - but then devolves into scenarios of unimaginable torture. Spending eight years of objective time searching for a bathroom. Experiencing every second of a dream in which you're a soldier hiding out in the jungle forced to auto-cannibalize to stay alive. And all the while gradually mutating into some other form of humanity the further into the future you go, becoming unrecognizable, a thing from another time, another place, alienated from everyone you may once have known.

While Long Dream does get the point of this scenario's implications across quite well, I think it fumbles a bit in trying to stretch out the manga to even the short length of the film. Dr. Kuroda's (weird-ass) personal life isn't a part of the original manga, although his questionable medical ethics were, and while it does provide more depth to the story and a slightly disquieting sense that the "long dreams" cannot be contained to one person, it's also just kinda your run-of-the-mill Dead Wife Backstory that I didn't feel particularly engaged with, capped off with an ending that in anything else would have been an unforgivable cliche but actually kind of works here.

But isn't it spooky? The little details are where the movie really gets you. If I may be allowed to get into the weeds a bit here, I think the reason why watching Mukouda slowly mutate as he experiences jaunts further and further into the future is the same reason why séances and Victorian spirit mediums were so effective (setting aside the overwhelming need people felt to contact their deceased loved ones). You, an outsider (Mukouda's medical team), are witnessing a medium (Mukouda) engage not bodily but mentally with another place or another plane of existence that is forbidden to you, and the only testament to what that place is like is the medium's reaction. Us normal people cannot go there, but we can watch someone else go there. But because Mukouda's mental state eventually begins to deteriorate, we don't really even get clear testimony of where he's going, and that makes it scarier. All we can tell is that it's someplace where humans have become very, very different from what they are now.

After this, I think Uzumaki is due for a rewatch and possibly a re-read as well, although based on other people's accounts, the anime adaptation was so profoundly disappointing that it will not be part of my Uzumaki experience going forward.