Psychic Vision: Jaganrei (1988)

directed by Teruyoshi Ishii

Japan

49 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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My excitement about seeing this was disproportionate to its short running time. It sounded like something that ticked all of my boxes, and it was. There was this brief moment in the 1980s and '90s where a lot of movies were coming out that explored how old traditions of ghosts and hauntings might be integrated into a world that was rapidly becoming more technologically advanced, and some real bangers came out of that question - I'm thinking Prince of Darkness - but now the subgenre of "digital haunting" seems to have become saturated by a thousand iterations of "what if there was an evil app and a ghost came out of it".

Psychic Vision: Jaganrei purports to have been intended as a documentary about an idol revamping her image and debuting as a more mature singer with a new single. It's not any kind of incisive deep-dive into the idol industry, which is horror fodder unto itself, but pretty soon a few odd things start cropping up as the crew follows the process of writing, producing, and recording the song. I love how this movie segues into the supernatural because it's so innocuous at first. When it becomes clear that the original writer of the idol's new song is unknown, it doesn't feel that strange, because songs are so often ghostwritten or lifted from magazine contest submissions that it's entirely possibly the true authorship could just get forgotten. But as the film goes on, the identity of the writer becomes a crucial element to its plot. This film is so short that it would be easy to spoil it, so I'm going to keep my review brief and try not to give away too much.

There's a moment where the movie palpably ramps up from being a fairly tame mystery to showing its teeth a little, and I'm not going to say what it is, but if you've seen this, you probably know. It involves a car. That's what I'm talking about when I say that this movie knows how to segue: Abruptly, when it has to get your attention, but also, at the same time, slowly, over the course of the entire film, to keep that attention. It's got a big vibe for such a short movie, and covers lot of themes that I'm personally really fascinated with - the transfer of energy into a digital format, basically a "grudge"; this is revisited in Ringu when it's revealed that Sadako is making films using pure psychic energy. If I have any complaints about this at all, it's that the backstory of the weird psychic attacks is made too cut-and-dry - I liked it better when it was an onslaught of bizarre, unstoppable terror with no apparent explanation, but that's a personal preference.

I have no doubt whatsoever that the song being titled "Love Craft" was just a random choice. H.P. Lovecraft absolutely has a following in Japan, and this director also helmed several episodes of Ultraman Tiga and Ultraman Gaia - the spookier episodes, of course - and both of those series notably took story elements from Lovecraft's work. He also directed for Ultraman Cosmos, Choseishin Gransazer, and unfortunately not a whole lot else. The actress who played the idol, Emi Satô, is just credited as "self", so I'm not sure if that means that she's an idol in real life or not, but a quick glance at her filmography doesn't make it look that way. It's too bad that this is so obscure, and that everything else by the director - popular television series excepted - is obscure as well, because there's some really interesting stuff in Psychic Vision: Jaganrei, and I kind of wish this was a full-length film.