Senritsu Kaiki File Kowasugi! Final Chapter (2015)

directed by Koji Shiraishi

Japan

89 minutes

5 stars out of 5

----

Hi, hello, this is the best movie I've ever seen in my life.

I want to apologize if I've ever sounded dismissive when I was talking about Koji Shiraishi's preoccupation with his weird worm dimension thing. That was never my intent - I was never making fun of it, I never thought it was just some wacky idea, I always took it seriously; I guess I just thought it was a little funny how insistent he is about it. But now I see. This is what it was all leading to. This masterpiece of a film.

Here, the format of the previous entries in the Senritsu Kaiki File series is dispensed with entirely, as we pick up immediately after The Most Terrifying Movie in History. Ichikawa and Kudo are lost in worm hell, so Tashiro has been left behind to finish the movie (and he apparently makes a pretty good profit off of it, too). But things have been changing ever since the crew uncovered the demon soldier project. The world that Tashiro lives in now feels intensely unsafe. We see him talking to his livestream viewers in his apartment at night, alone, and even then, we can feel this sense of unease. Then Tashiro hears a knock on his window - his second-floor balcony window - and both he and the viewers are abruptly catapulted into complete and utter chaos.

Entering the picture very suddenly is a man named Eno whose origins are never explained (although the translator makes sure to note that he has a really strong Osaka accent). Eno seems to know everything about what the world is becoming - or maybe not everything about it, but he knows how to stop what's happening. (By "what's happening" I mean the growing crisis situation that followed the appearance of a massive hovering silhouette in the sky over Shinjuku - this will all be explained reasonably well if you've yet to catch up with the previous films.) Unfortunately for Tashiro, he is the only one who can execute this plan that will not only bring Ichikawa and Kudo back but also (ostensibly) correct the path towards annihilation that the world is headed down. Eno gives him four tasks that he says will result in his teammates coming back from the other dimension, and I won't get into what these are since every one of them is hideously disgusting, but through his steadfast adherence to Eno's plan, Tashiro confirms what we could all already tell - that only one thing matters to him:

Filming. He has to film everything. When Eno threatens to shoot him for not moving fast enough, he's afraid, of course, as anyone would be. But it doesn't compel him to act. What compels him is when Eno points the gun at the camera. That - and only that - is unacceptable.

Shiraishi is doing something really incredible here. This is the end game of the entire series. I was right about how it wasn't so much a bunch of disparate cases of paranormal phenomenon - maybe that all existed, but in the background the whole time, an apocalypse had been slowly forming. Shiraishi continues to use the found-footage tools he's demonstrated such proficiency with, but now instead of low-stakes (yet terrifying) movies about kappa and haunted toilets, he's showing us the fabric of reality folding and unfolding, truth and fiction blurring, timelines disintegrating. It feels real. Shiraishi convinces us that it is real, because he begins to involve himself - his real self. When Eno called Shiraishi by his real name it shook me to my core. The incredibly delicate and at times transparent third wall this movie sets up is a thing of beauty.

I have to talk about the climax. It's impossible to explain this without going through a play-by-play of the film as a whole, so I won't try. When Kudo was poised to end the entire world and therefore bring about a better one with his Cronenberg-ass arm gun supported by Ichikawa as Tashiro filmed it all, I realized that this moment was an encapsulation of the series as a whole. Kudo is raw, unhinged chaos energy, and Ichikawa is there to aim him at what needs to be done, to try to exert at least some small measure of control over his utterly batshit persona so that the team can run itself as something vaguely resembling a business. And Tashiro's role is to film it. Shiraishi's role is to film it. To make meaning out of what the team sees.

Can the three of them save the world this way? No. But they can destroy it and start again, and keep making movies in whatever new world they find themselves in.