directed by Koji Shiraishi
Japan
73 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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I do apologize that this blog seems to be becoming The Gamera and Senritsu Kaiki File Show™, but hey, I like what I like.
The format is changed up a little bit here: instead of having a scene where the investigative crew watches a video together, then goes to interview the people involved in shooting it, we open with the team interviewing paranormal eyewitnesses right away. I must admit I don't know much about the story of Hanako, but it doesn't seem like it's too complicated; it's basically an urban legend that proliferates throughout many schools across Japan that claims the school toilets are haunted by the ghost of a girl who died in them. (No I am not familiar with the manga.) Our amateur videographers in File 04 are two girls who sneak into their old school during off hours to try to get Hanako to appear, which she does, and scares the living daylights out of them - so they do the logical thing and call the Senritsu Kaiki File Kowasugi folks. Together with a psychic they picked up, the film crew and the two girls return to the school in daytime to look into the footage.
(I'm going to talk openly about spoilers here because this movie takes a hard turn out of nowhere and it would be impossible to talk about the film itself without giving away the plot.)
Very suddenly and for no apparent reason this becomes a time travel movie. The crew and their plus-ones witness Hanako firsthand and are thrown into total dimensional chaos, meeting alternate versions of themselves face-to-face and getting sent into a bizarre time loop where they keep skipping around between days and nights and one of the two girls actually disappears. This is when I realized that Shiraishi was doing things with this movie that are extremely deft: this is a time-loop film, shot with almost zero cuts, shown virtually in real time, disguised as a found-footage horror movie. If we've been watching this series up to this point, we're used to seeing Kudo being an asshole and random ghosts showing up. We're not expecting to see the entire crew thrust into a fractured timeline that they seemingly can't escape from.
And it's kind of riveting to watch. Like I said, virtually no cuts, just the crew running around the school trying to figure out how to get the missing girl back and reset the timeline without encountering themselves (this can apparently do irreparable damage to reality somehow). Then there's Hanako, who serves as the vehicle for Shiraishi's beloved worm dimension, which is, as always, never elaborated upon. I love the idea that all of the disparate paranormal phenomena the team investigates throughout these films seems to be connected to the parallel dimension, as if the team is slowly uncovering the truth that there is no such thing as multiple ghosts but instead some kind of unified worldwide phenomenon linked not to the classic idea of spirits of the dead but to something altogether more alien.
The note Shiraishi ends the film on is so perfect. Kudo looking at the camera with an expression of defeat while Ichikawa frantically calls an ambulance in the background. That's it, no time to recuperate. Our story ends there.
I have to say that this might be my favorite of the films in this series that I've watched thus far, which is a bit ironic considering that it's also the least indicative of the series' overall vibe. But this is really something: this not only proves that Shiraishi is a filmmaker who can do incredibly good horror movies, he's also just an incredibly good filmmaker in general. I feel like this could have won some kind of award for how much it does on such a small scale.
I will also warn you that if you're watching the version of this that's on YouTube, the subtitles are extremely bad. If you know even a little Japanese you will realize almost immediately that half of the dialogue does not match the subs. If it sounds stupid at times (and if the characters sound very profane) that's entirely down to the subtitles, not the film itself.
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