Marebito: Reviews

This year, Danger After Dark begins by throwing a special spotlight on a quartet of outstanding titles being released in this country by the Tartan company’s Asia Extreme outfit, designed to highlight the best in Asian genre filmmaking. First up is Marebito, a thoroughly bizarre new work from director Takashi Shimizu, arguably Japan’s biggest horror filmmaker. Shimizu is the man behind the four Ju-on films in Japan, as well as their Americanized incarnation, The Grudge — yet Marebito is wholly unlike those smash hits. Shimizu’s Ju-on/Grudge titles are efficient, jaggedly plotted shock-machines, but Marebito is a uniquely poetic and otherworldly dark fantasy that unfolds like a linear waking dream – or nightmare. Masuoka (played by Vital director Shinya Tsukamoto) is a cameraman who records a man’s suicide in the Tokyo subway system, and he finds himself haunted by the videotaped man’s final expression of terror, directed towards unseen forces. Masuoka ventures underground to investigate, and uncovers a mysterious Lovecraftian subterranean landscape — in other words, hell. Within this world, Masuoka encounters a mute, nude feral girl with fanged teeth, and he takes her back to his home. However, the girl appears to be slowly withering away . . . until Masuoka discovers what she actually requires as nourishment to survive. Shot on digital video in only eight days, Marebito is an eerie burst of primal, trancelike creativity from Shimizu — a rewardingly radical, remake-proof work between all the Grudging.