Lovely Devils (1982)

directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi

Japan

94 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I'm a really big fan of Nobuhiko Obayashi, and this more obscure film of his was on my watchlist for a long time. I can't say it's all bad that Hausu has become vastly more well-known than Obayashi himself, because it's one of my personal favorites too, but it can gear the uninitiated up for a different experience when checking out his non-Hausu work. That being said, though, Lovely Devils (and most of his other films, honestly) is still a deeply weird film. If I had watched this on "Tuesday Night Suspense Theater" in 1982 as it was originally aired, I would have come away from it wondering what in the world I had just seen.

This movie was not written by Obayashi, and I have no doubt that if anybody else had directed it, it would have been an absolutely bog-standard thriller with few remarkable qualities. The plot is largely straightforward on paper, but made weirder by the disorientating directorial style. The film opens at a wedding party where we're introduced to basically the main antagonist, a little girl named Alice who is extremely intent on getting her aunt's wedding veil, and when she promises that Alice can have the veil after the aunt dies... Alice does what's gotta be done to get that veil. This sets us up for a movie full of Alice's further misdeeds, but the actual main character is a distant, non-blood relation of Alice and her family whose situation parallels Alice's in certain ways. We see that she holds herself responsible for the accidental death of her boyfriend, who died in a car crash after she wished he was dead during a fight, and that this troubled her so much that she ended up in a mental hospital for several years before being released to come and stay with her brother-in-law, who lives with Alice and her mother.

I say that their situation is parallel because what Alice does without guilt, Ryoko thinks she may have done once, to fatal ends, and the guilt torments her for the rest of her life. Alice wishes people dead and acts on it, making her desires manifest no matter what's in her way so that she may get whatever object or end result she desires. Ryoko is haunted by wishing someone was dead and seemingly making it happen. It's like Alice represents the side of Ryoko that she's afraid to let take over - a remorseless, almost psychically powerful arbiter of life and death.

On its own, like I said, this is decent suspense-movie fodder, but not that weird. However, the way Obayashi lays it all out is borderline hallucinatory. The wedding scene at the beginning could have been one of the most normal points of the film, but instead it feels extremely uncomfortable and tense because everything is taking place in what looks like a severe windstorm. This is not plot-relevant whatsoever, but stuff feels worse when it's windy out. It's beautiful and sunny, and everyone is dressed in their nicest clothes, trying to enjoy one of the best days of their lives, but their hats are flying off and everything is blowing around and it just looks like a really bad time.

Recently, Midsommar brought up much discussion over whether a horror movie could be truly scary if the horror of it took place in the daylight. "Daylight horror" was not really coined as a phrase at the time when this movie was released, though I have no doubt that the concept was discussed in horror fan circles, but I would argue that much of Obayashi's oeuvre almost defines daylight horror, especially his influential Emotion. Lovely Devils is 100% daytime, appearing to take place on the brightest and calmest (save for the wedding) summer day you can imagine that never ends, and the women all wear these gorgeous white flowing dresses with pretty straw sunhats and look immaculate. The interior shots are lush and inviting, the scenery is green and beautiful, and the whole of the film looks like something you wish you could fall asleep and wake up in. But there's also something deeply wrong. I would say that one of the biggest contributing factors to this feeling is actually the one thing about the film that I initially disliked: the fact that the soundtrack is so overwhelming and ever-present. There's pretty much not a single second of this film that isn't flooded with loud classical string music, and at first I was waiting for this to stop because it was distracting, but as the film went on I realized that it fit perfectly with the overall tone and it became one of my favorite things about it. The heavy use of music really sums up the aesthetic of Lovely Devils as a whole: beautiful, elegant, relaxing images and sounds, but cranked up and shoved at you so much that it feels stifling.

The movie actually gets significantly less outwardly strange after maybe the first 20 minutes, but it never stops drowning you in classical music and the horribly, hideously lush countryside. There are singular images in this that I felt were as visually striking as anything out of Hausu, although less unorthodox - the sound effect used in a particular scene involving a glass vase (which you can just tell is coming throughout the entire film, thanks to some very effective use of the Chekhov's Gun technique) is going to haunt me forever. I really, really loved this, and I wish it was more well-known outside of a specific circle of film fans. There's a lot more to it that makes it a lot more strange than I could describe in a review, so the best I can say is: go watch it. It's on YouTube.