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.

Masuoka (Shinya Tsukamoto) is a cameraman possessed by the craving to understand fear. In particular, he obsesses over his footage of a grisly suicide in the subway. Returning to the scene to better comprehend the dead man's reasoning, he opens a doorway into a bizarre, cavernous underworld. Here among the ghosts and subterranean creatures he finds a beautiful, mute girl whom he takes home. As days pass he begins to suspect there is something truly inhuman about this girl. When he begins to uncover her horrifying secrets, Masuoka realizes that he has found the key to gaining the terrible knowledge he so craves...