Joyû-rei

First a bit about the story. A young director working in the japanese studio system is making a WWII period film requiring strong emotional scenes from two young actresses. There is quite a bit of plot revolving around the casting of the actresses, as well as illumination of their very different personalities and maturation. The director has to fight against agents and studio brass to cast the actors he wants to cast, and this preoccupies much of the early portion of the film.

While screening dailies, the production crew stumbles upon a strange accident. Some of the negative they were using appears to have been previously exposed, and has portions of a much older Japanese film featuring a rather transfixing actress from the past. The young Director is particularly intrigued, as the film seems to trigger a childhood recollection of watching the film years earlier on TV. He assigns the Studio editor to dig up information on this film, to put his mind at ease, and the film production proceeds from there, although clearly now haunted by questions about this other film, and its mysterious star.

If you are a fan of Ringu, now remade in the US as The Ring, you will no doubt find it interesting how many of the same ideas and motifs are present in Ghost Actress. In many ways, in retrospect, Ghost Actress appears to be a working out of stylistic and narrative techniques which made Ringu such a huge success.

The problems with Ghost Actress can primarily be traced back to the muddy script, which poses many questions without answering any. As I mentioned, much of the early film proves in the end to be entirely irrelevant to the central plot, and there isn't a strong linear thread driving the protagonist of the film, namely the young Director. He simply seems to be reacting to the situational dilemmas confronting him, and despite the nerdy likableness of Actor Yuurei Yanagi, doesn't illicit a lot of concern for his predicament or obsessions.

The conclusion of the film however, is undeniably powerful, and hints at Director Hideo Nakata's talent for combining supernatural themes with striking visual and sound design to great unnerving effect.

After watching this film last night on Sundance, I realized that much of Nakata's style was first done in this film. Here we have many of the same elements of the RINGU series, especially the idea of the media being the source of the supernatural. Instead of the cursed videotape, we instead having a haunted studio and strange images appearing on film. In fact, the strange images appearing on film brings immediately the cursed videotape in RINGU to mind. The only thing missing was the obsession to water that runs through Nakata's later films. The final scenes are quite chilling, with a bit of a nod to Murnau, what with the door opening by itself ands the ghost entering the room, reminds me immediatly of

NOSFERATU. A chilling movie that will make think twice about going up to a catwalk.

Second feature film from the man who would go on to make The Ring and Dark Water, indeed his very first film if you exclude, as I see IMDb do, a 'pink'. but first or second it is a great effort and if it doesn't totally succeed it certainly has some very creepy moments and is breaking new ground for a ghost film. He is already using the media, ghostly images appear superimposed upon the film he is using to shoot a melodrama, and utilising the long haired maniacal girl/ghost image. Modest running time exactly in accordance with the requirements of the story; if only all directors would go short if the story did not warrant more. A little confusing now and again because Mr Nakata does not lay everything out that obviously but well worth catching.

This film is great at putting ideas into the viewer's subconscious. The whole simple idea of the story is great, by having the characters shoot a film such that the viewer almost feels like they are separated from the characters and in tune with the supernatural. Since you are watching people making a movie investigating another movie, it brings you into the action, as if the same things could happen to you. The blandness of some scenes on the surface is really fun when contrasted against the supernatural events that happen later. An example is a line where the director tells the actress not to "look down" when saying her lines, when she really shouldn't be "looking up" later when she encounters the ghost. One of the most interesting things about this movie is that you wouldn't even think this was a ghost story in some scenes until you realize the context it is in. Definitely this is one of the best ghost detective stories, it has an almost meditative nature and makes the movie more scary. The over the shoulder scenes of the ghost are very scary, partly because the movie often shows people filming from the opposite angle, so you are actually watching them film, scenes in which you could become the ghost. By concentrating on the existence of the ghost, the whole movie becomes more scary.

Not on the same level as Ring (or Ring 2) but still a good Japanese horror flick nonetheless. I wish North American horror producers would take a page out of the Japanese horror template and put more 'spookiness' and less cheap shocks in their flicks. Lots of good examples in this one, scenes where a whited out face is scene staring behind a young actress, photographs on a wall are suddenly glimpsed smiling, just for a second, and more. Worth checking out if you like the genre.