Never underestimate the power of good sound effects. In any genre of cinema but maybe most of all in horror, and whether subtle or vivid, creative audio cues have made all the difference in giving unexpected power to some moment or creature, allowing them to gain infamy and live rent-free in our minds. The tell-tale skittering noise of the ghost in 'Teketeke,' born of urban legend in Japan, is surely one of the top highlights in the abbreviated runtime of seventy minutes. For that matter, the very notion is ripe for genre storytelling; how many flicks have made an impression even just with the visual design of some facet, or an intangible idea that gets lodged in our imagination? Factor in unnatural posture, and/or movement, and one has a viscerally unnerving trifecta on their hands with strong potential. With Tsuburaya Productions providing some key practical effects, it would seem as if essential elements are all in place for this 2009 release to be a sinister good time. The question does remain, however: beyond a short film of a brisk few minutes, how might the modern myth of the teketeke spirit could be drawn out into a full-length feature?
The answer is "with mixed success." Some choices of stylization are outright unnecessary, including the occasional first-person perspective. I very much enjoy Shimizu Mari's music in and of itself, but it sometimes seems too overt and grandiose to entirely fit here, somewhat working against the vibrancy of the primary horror material. Speaking of which, while the entity looks great as designed, I wonder if the conception here isn't too fantastical for its own good; if an urban legend is about a human, to any degree rendering the subject in a more outwardly inhuman form seems a step too far. Moreover, as is too often the case, I think we maybe see too much of the specter, reducing its effectiveness, including at the climax.
And the fact of the matter is that try as they might, screenwriter Akimoto Takeki and director Shiraishi Koji were straining way too hard hard to conjure substance for cinematic treatment. The plot is built around the personal life of protagonist Kana, then subsequent efforts to find out more about the spirit. No few shots get repeated to pad out the length, however; some bits of dialogue are revisited with only slight variation as characters ponder the ghost and who she was in life. All additional info and plot frankly just come across as a transparently thin, flimsy effort to dress up something which may after all have been better off realized as a tiny, punchy short that had no excess in the first place. Case in point, within the last twenty minutes Kana and Rie face obstacles so absurdly mundane that the result is almost parodic, and even the climax is one tidbit after another of "are you kidding me?"
The cast ably play their parts. I appreciate Akimoto's effort - incidentally, the final scene might bear the best thought poured into the otherwise shaky expanded narrative - and Shiraishi did a fine job with what he had to work with. It bears repeating that the audiovisual rendering of teketeke, in and of herself, is excellent, further including special makeup. The picture is broadly well made. Yet it rather comes off as a cash grab: not necessarily insincere in its intent, but the outcome of latching onto any slight modicum of a thought and stretching it as far as it could go, then further still. We watch this happen too often when a studio picks up a short film to adapt into a full-length movie, taking something brilliant and watering it down; see Bryce McGuire's 'Night swim,' or Andres Muschietti's 'Mama.' And here, too, albeit without a prior short involved. I don't dislike 'Teketeke,' and I commend the work everyone put into it. I just think that it didn't really need to be made at all, and unless you're obsessed with Japanese horror, there's no particular reason to go out of your way for this.
