Marebito

This sounded very interesting to me in an abstract/visual experiment kind of way when I read about it. Man takes a movie camera to the subway of Tokyo in search of unspeakable horrors and comes up with some to take back to his apartment. I love movies that take a peripatetic approach, that take us on walkabouts through weird/elaborate architecture, from The Shining to Last Year at Marienbad, and I hoped this would be one of the greats.

I like these films to be shot in DV, lights are harsh and cold and space attains an immediacy that appeals to me. If I was disappointed in this then it's not because it meanders and is short on plot but rather because the lovely visual experiment is used by Shimizu to tell a story of almost EC Comics simplicity, madness and damnation. The protagonist sees news footage of a man stabbing his eye in the Tokyo subway. The epiphany to go looking in the subway for that ultimate terror gleaming in the victim's eyes moments before his death comes seemingly after a quick mashup of superimposed images of video screens, white noise, and reaction shots of the character looking dazed - a visual slapdash chaos that seems like the director's way of saying "something clicked in his mind" and nothing more.

I like that Shimizu simply took a camera to the streets of Tokyo to make Marebito, we really don't see enough films of that kind by people who know how to make them, and I wish he would've used Hollow Earth as a springboard of ideas instead of making direct allusions to it. I was fascinated by the subject in my teens, as with other mystical theories I'm still shocked that there are people who take it at face value, as something more than interesting myth (Shimizu fortunately is not one of them), yet the discussion in the subway tunnel where a bunch of arcane references to the subject are bandied up serves nothing. I'm still glad that I saw it though, made me want to see some more Shinya Tsukamoto.

In the end, Marebito is about a man's struggle with his own madness, but it's a bit slapdash about telling us about it.

I highly suggest seeing this film if you are a fan of Shimizu's works. Apparently it was filmed before Ju-On, in only eight days. This shows what a master filmmaker can do in such a short time. This movie will make you feel very uncomfortable and extremely disturbed. It is about a camera man who wants nothing more than to feel the most extreme fear. He than finds a subterranean lair filled with eerie creatures called Deros, and he finds a girl (or a creature much like a girl) chained to a rock and takes her home to care for her. He attempts to feed her but he finds that the only thing that she'll eat is blood. The only problems I had with it were the shaky camera moves (Blair-Witch style)but since he only made it in eight days...he has an excuse, and it will go to a normal camera to give your eyes a break. Overall a masterpiece in psycho-horror.

Also known as 'The Stranger from Afar', this Japanese horror film focuses on a freelance photographer who rescues a naked woman chained to a rock in a subway tunnel; he takes her home, only to discover that she is more animalistic than human with a taste for blood. The film is pretty much as weird as it sounds with little indication of just how much of what occurs is hallucination, imaginary or real. It remains a gripping ride though even when everything cannot be deciphered thanks to a truckload of atmosphere and a genuinely unsettling turn by Tomomi Miyashita as the mysterious woman. Some of the symbolism hits home quite well too with the protagonist viewing himself as a vampire, feeding off filming the misery and pain of others (sort of like Jake Gyllenhaal's character in 'Nightcrawler', but with a moral compass here). The film also taps into some curious territory early on as the protagonist announces a desire to find what caused a man to be so terrified that he committed suicide before his camera lens; some of his soliloquies in this early part of the film bring to mind 'Videodrome' as he equates cameras to the retinas of human eyes. One's mileage with 'Marebito' will no doubt vary depending on one's tolerance for the unexplained and deliberate ambiguity, but it is certainly refreshingly different from most other vampire movies out there.

A strange film by Grudge writer/director Takashi Shimizu.

Shinya Tsukamoto (Ichi the Killer) is consumed with finding out the source of terror that caused a man to stab himself in the eye. He wants to experience the same terror - terror so horrible that it would cause you to want to kill yourself.

He goes underground looking for the beings that inhabit the tunnels under Tokyo and finds a naked girl, who he brings home to live with him. The girls is more animal than human and he kills to provide her blood rather than give her his own blood, which she wants.

It is not certain throughout whether he is going mad or finding what he is searching for. He even tries to escape, but resumes the search until he finally succumbs to the terror.

Despite the shaky camera work, which some like, but which distracts me, it was a fascinating look at terror and certainly a film that contains much more than available at first glance. A blend of mysticism and horror, it is a worthy view for fans of Japanese horror.

This was just a strange movie, but not in a cool way, like Forbidden Zone, or Uzumaki. Just weird.

All I can say is that a creepy voyeur cameraman sees a guy commit suicide by stabbing himself, and wonders what he had seen that made him so terrified. Any more said would ruin it.

Sure, the acting by the guy was good, and you never know what is going to happen next, and it is well shot, but it is ultimately boring, and the ending doesn't satisfy you. I did enjoy it on some level, but by the end, I was ready to stop watching.

6/10