For some reason I anticipated a noir work here or the perversion of it, a Lynchian narrative where dreams are the scene of the crime. It didn't bother me that it's not, but it did bother me that it's a hodge podge of ideas.
Most of all it stands out as a Paprika played out as a cop thriller, sometimes a J-horror, even rarely a Tsukamoto film. It's weird but half- or ill-formed, not in the sense that we're watching an elipsis where details are absent of explanation as part of a design, but in the sense that it wasn't really thought out or it was believed the concept of a serial killer visiting his victims in their sleep would carry it. We even get the mandatory scene where the cop heroine fights to stay awake and is terrified to realize she isn't. This is the first letdown, that Tsukamoto doesn't realize he's in a whole other league than Wes Craven.
Often with Tsukamoto the ideas he presents are largely frameworks, explorations in a general direction. He doesn't probe deeply but what appeals to me is the fascinating artifice of that exploration, the frame itself. This one has a cheap TV look and an annoying overabundance of whip zooms in and out of convalescent images, again for no apparent reason.
The ending, as with the parting shot of Vital, is rather marvellous though. Against a meaningless universe, lives without purpose or direction, Tsukamoto gives us a collage of small intimate moments. The bittersweet nature of this final hold against the existential void, is that what he offers us is memory, the empty shell of something come and gone played out for comfort in the mind.
Perhaps this reveals Tsukamoto's limitation as a filmmaker, in this and other films. It's great that he sees that far, into a vision of humanity which is further than most directors doing horror related work are capable of, it's a pity that he doesn't see further.
