Marebito

In Tokyo, the freelancer cameraman Takuyoshi Masuoka (Shinya Tsukamoto) is obsessed investigating the fear sensation near death. When he shots with his camera a man stabbing himself in the eye in the access to the subway, he seeks what the suicidal might have seen to experiment the same sense of horror the man felt when he died. He finds a passage to the underground of Tokyo where he meets a mysterious naked woman that does not speak and he calls her F (Tomomi Miyashita). He brings F to his place and he has difficulties to feed her, until he discovers that she drinks blood. Masuika becomes a serial killer draining the blood of his victims to nurse F.

"Marebito" is a very weird low-budget movie that discloses the madness process of the lead character through his journey to hell in the underground of Tokyo. This original story is disturbing and unpleasant, using a morbid and creepy atmosphere, to unravel the twisted mind of a deranged man. However this strange movie is recommended for very specific audiences only. My vote is six.

Title (Brazil): "Marebito: Seres Estranhos" ("Marebito: Weird Beings")

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

This is a marvelous movie.

More than a psychological abyss than a straight horror, this little dagger stabs deeper than most of the pretentious psycho thrillers will ever.

Although this masterpiece is not for everyone. It offers a bunch of pretty disturbing scenes, but one has to watch it at least twice, in order to fully comprehend it's twisted metaphoric.

If you find this movie weird, just stop and think about how weirder is the whole mankind. Instead. Horrible thurths are revealed through this genius metaphor of vampyrism.

Cult director Shinya Tsukamoto (whom I'm a devotee) gives the hell out of a performance. This guy is either crazy, either true genius, either both. I'I'm so very impressed.

And a la fin, a quote from marebito: "Horror, is actually an ancient wisdom that we find deep in the memory of our souls....."

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.

Marebito starts out with an interesting premise, but somewhere along the way the movie falls apart.

A camera man captures a man in the subway committing suicide by stabbing himself in the eye. The camera man becomes transfixed by the death image of the man and studies the footage with the hopes of finding a clue as to why the man would commit such an act. He surmises that the man has experienced something so terrifying immediately before his death as to render him suicidal. So the camera man ventures into the subway for clues and finds a door that leads even further down into the subway. The beginning part of the film captured my interest.

Too bad.

What the main lead uncovers...actually what he finds beneath the subway...and what unfolds thereafter is incredibly dull. The rest of the film becomes a jumbled mess as the main character tries to rationalize, in his more and more irrational mind, the supernatural events that unfold. But the film looks rushed and uninspired...it does look like it was filmed in two weeks.

I thought Ju-on was creepy and fairly good as a horror film. The director's effort on this film is unfocused and meandering; he even interlaces at points in the film, clumsily I might add, with discussions of philosophy and the supernatural in the hopes, I suppose, of lending the film some gravitas. Is the director trying to be metaphorical and deliberately obtuse? I don't know and I did not care.

Because I found some parts of the film creepy and even innovative, I rate this film: Average.