Movie Trailer: Dark Water (2005)

Television and Cinema Verities: Dark Water Edition

"I feel it's less a kind of just visceral, more kind of unsettling, more emotionally provocative. That's my feeling about it. I think it's subtler, but still scary. It ha a kind of moral, get under your skin scary. More thought-provoking. That's really because of the script and Walter and his - I think he felt like with supernatural scenes he wanted to anchor the film in reality."

- Jennifer Connelly reflects on the differences and similarities between The Ring (2002), The Grudge (2004) and Dark Water (2005). From an interview with Devin Faraci in Chud.com.(June 9, 2005).

Movie Trailer: Pulse (2006)

Cult-Movie Review: The Grudge (2004)

Based on Ju-On (2002) -- which is actually the fourth film in the Japanese horror franchise -- The Grudge (2004) is the second big American film of the Japanese horror remake boom of the early 2000s.. 

In short, The Grudge is very much the Friday the 13^th (1980) to The Ring’s (2002) Halloween (1978).

Many of the creative elements of The Ring, in fact, are repeated in The Grudge (2004). 

For example, The Grudge, directed by Takashi Shimizu continues with the new (for America) horror paradigm that simply being present is enough to render one guilty in the eyes of the supernatural. One need not commit a significant wrong, beyond being at the wrong place at the wrong time.

Even more than that, The Grudge displays significant uneasiness with (then) modern technology such as VCRs and answering machines.

Similarly, certain visual symbols -- buzzing flies, an oval mirror, photographs, videotape imagery, the dead boyfriend, and a secret family trauma -- recur from The Ring to The Grudge. 

And yet, this is -- again much like the American slasher film examples I listed above -- not a case of “copying” or ripping off” another property. 

Operating within similar moral and structural parameters, The Grudge instead stakes out unique horror territory, and emerges as a successful work of art.

Although the film may not possess, in the final analysis, the raw power and terror of The Ring, The Grudge is nonetheless deeply creepy, and trades successfully on the notion that a trauma -- much like an answering machine message or a videotape recording -- can be replayed and re-experienced, only with horrific effect for the percipient. 

Psychological trauma, in other words, leaves behind a physical record that can be experienced by others.  

And by interfacing with it, you become part of the next, bloody chapter.

Especially inventive here is The Grudge’s complex narrative structure, which in a weird way moves backwards at the same time that it moves forward. 

The Grudge begins at a late point of attack with the arrival at the “grudge”-infected Saeki house by a nurse named Karen (Sarah Michelle Gellar). 

It then moves, vector-by-vector back to the original source of the infection or trauma: the tragedy of the Saeki family. 

At the same time, Karen’s story draws towards its frightening conclusion.

The only realm in which the American version of The Grudge really falters is in its baffling omission of the one character that actually unloosed the rage in the first place, Takeo Saeki, sort of the “patient zero” in the grudge/curse progression I diagrammed above. 

Without his presence, the American version of the material feels somewhat incomplete, like we haven’t quite gotten to the core or meaning of this trauma that “never forgives, never forgets.” 

Despite this flaw, The Grudge successfully raises hackles, and again asks viewers to contemplate a world in which you can become a victim…just because of the room you happen to walk into.

“It will never let you go.”

An American student named Karen Davis (Sarah Michelle Gellar) interns as a care-worker in Tokyo and is assigned to take care of an old woman with dementia, Emma (Grace Zabriskie) following the disappearance of her previous care-worker, Yoko (Yoko Maki)

At Emma’s house, however, Karen discovers a strange child, Toshio (Yuya Ozeki), and a dark female spirit or presence.

After a stay in the hospital, Karen looks more deeply into the mystery of the house, and learns that Emma’s family -- who live there with her -- have all died.  The corpses of her son, Matthew (William Mapother) and daughter-in-law Jennifer (Clea DuVall) are discovered in the attic.  Also found is a severed jaw.

Karen  soon learns from Detective Nakagawa (Ryo Ishibashi) that three of his police detective friends who went inside the house have also died. 

She traces the string of murders back to an American professor, Peter Kirk (Bill Pullman), and learns that one of his students, Kayako Saeki (Takao Fuji) had a romantic obsession with him, an obsession that infuriated her husband, Taeko.

And Taeko, Kayako, and Toshio all lived in Emma's house...

“The whole time I was in that house, I felt that something was wrong.”

At the heart of The Grudge is brutal violence in the family. A father and husband, Takeo, believes that his wife, Kayako has been unfaithful to him with an American professor, Peter Kirk.  In a fit of rage, he murders her, and their little boy, Toshio. 

In that moment of rage, a curse or “grudge” is born that has a life of its own, and like a disease, reaches out to touch anyone who enters the infection zone, in this case the Saeki house. 

This is a relatively simple story, but The Grudge’s clever structure permits for it to take on more meaning and complexity than a linear telling might. 

Similarly, the American version of The Grudge features an element the Japanese films necessarily do not.  

Specifically, The Grudge trades in a kind of cultural “lost in translation” vibe. Karen and her boyfriend, Douglas (Jason Behr) are strangers in a strange land, and therefore unfamiliar with the city, the people, and the customs. We have seen this idea played out before in American movies, and I have called it  Innocents Abroad, in honor of Mark Twain. 

Films such as Daughters of Satan (1971), Beyond Evil (1980) and The House Where Evil Dwells (1982) are a few examples in which Americans overseas must cope with supernatural terror, as well as a lack of understanding of the culture they are visiting.  

In The Grudge, we get several shots of Karen standing on a train, walking a busy street, and then walking through an alleyway near the Saeki house. Strangers look at her with inscrutable expressions, and there is a sense that they know more than she does.Or that they understand the world in a different way than she does. 

This fact is pointed out early, when Karen and Douglas pass a shrine and observe a Buddhist ritual that helps the dead find peace. This is an important moment, but the Americans don't recognize it as one that has great significance in their own lives.

Karen's lack of understanding of Tokyo and its customs (spiritual and earthbound) is reflected in several shots that reveal her physically separated by barriers from fellow city-dwellers.  

On the train, for example, Karen is framed inside a silver frame (really hold-bars).  Before she enters the house, she is likewise positioned between two vertical bars, and so on. All these shots indicate Karen's "separate" nature not only from Tokyo, but from an understanding of her environs.

The same idea recurs later in the film with Jennifer. She goes shopping at a Japanese grocery store, and is at a loss about what items she should buy. She tells her husband, Matthew that she wants to return to America.

There’s a deep and unsettling feeling in The Grudge that arises not just from the “curse” but from the fact that Karen, Douglas and Jennifer are so far from home, and clearly don’t understand the “spirit” world in the same way that folks such as Detective Nakagawa might.  

Again, this is not a small matter given the time period in which The Grudge was released.  

America was locked in the War on Terror, attempting to bring democracy to foreign lands such as Afghanistan and Iraq.  But in the case of Iraq, at least, there was the sense that America didn’t fully understand what it was getting into; that ancient and deep conflicts between sects had not been accounted for in our war plans.  The Grudge connects with and capitalizes on this idea, of a Westerner confronting a world-view not, simply, of the West.

Perhaps more to the point, the terrible events of 9/11 itself seems reflected in the "evil" force working in The Grudge.  The ghost reaches out and destroys American lives, even though Karen is innocent and knows nothing of the events that created "the grudge.  After 9/11, America realized it wasn't separate from the world, or immune from danger and strife arising elsewhere in the world.  In a way, this is very much Karen's lesson and journey as well.

What struck me as most intriguing upon my recent re-watch of The Grudge is the manner in which the film connects “the grudge” -- a spiritual force -- to technology. 

On several occasions  during the film, we hear Susan leave a message on an answering machine, for example.  

And at one point, Detective Nagakawa watches video footage from a high-rise office building that features the ghost of Kayako.  

When one couples these instances of characters replaying moments recorded on machines, a connection to the Saeki family (and the curse) becomes apparent.  

The house or spirits, are also replaying moments from the past.  Near film’s end, Karen wanders into one such replay, seeing Peter’s final visit to the Saeki home.  We are thus asked to confront the idea that a ghost may be, simply, a replay of human rage, a strong emotion impressed on a place and that infects that place.

In the Japanese version of this tale, Ju On: The Grudge, the final scene alone revealed the source of the grudge, the force doing the actual killing. Little Toshio and Kayako had been seen throughout, but the climactic scene reveals Takeo, and intimates that as the final piece of the grudge “replay,” he is the one who kills the living.

Yet Takeo is missing, except in a brief black-and-white flashback, from the American version of The Grudge, and so some of the storytelling feels incomplete.  Toshio and Kayako died in the grip of rage.  They felt that rage, but it did not originate with them.  It originated with Takeo and his jealousy. By removing him from this film, that last piece is missing, and it is not clear precisely why the female ghost and the child ghost are attacking people.

And yet, The Grudge succeeds as an experience, as we watch the spread of the “curse” and come to the conclusion that it is inescapable. The most effective scene in the film involves Susan, and her night-time, office-building experience with the ghosts. A perfectly contained set-piece and a textbook example of splendidly-wrought, mounting suspense, the scene reaches to a crescendo of horror with the revelation that the ghosts are inside her apartment, and indeed, under her bed covers with her.

On a very simple level, The Grudge is about how rage touches people -- even people unconnected to that rage -- and ruins their lives. 

Just by being at the wrong place at the wrong time, people can suffer. This conceit seems like a perfect metaphor for the angry, violent culture we live in today, post-Aurora, post-Sandy Hook. 

Rage can reach out and grab any of us, at any time, and there’s no antidote, no societal cure for it.  

As The Grudge points out, guilty or innocent, we are all at risk of being "consumed by its fury."

Movie Trailer: The Grudge (2004)

Cult-Movie Review: The Ring (2002)

The Ring (2002) -- an American remake of Ringu (1998) from director Gore Verbinski -- commenced the Japanese horror remake trend of over a decade ago.

Some may view this fact as a negative legacy, since the trend resulted in some truly bad horror films, like The Eye (2008) and One Missed Call (2008). 

On the other hand, The Ring is universally-acclaimed as the best of the J-Horror remake breed, and more than that, I’d name it as one of the ten best horror films from the span 2000 – 2009. 

In short, the film succeeds not only because it is scary as hell (especially considering it is rated PG-13), but because -- like all the great horror movies in history -- it expresses something important about the age in which it was created.

In this case, The Ring obsesses on the notion that modern technology is not connecting or informing the population of the 21^st century, but rather negatively influencing and otherwise harming them. As you no doubt recall, the movie concerns a VHS tape that will kill you if you watch it, but will permit you to live in peace if you pass it on to other viewers. 

In the social media-heavy Web 2.0 Age of “shares” and “retweets” this cycle of copying and re-broadcasting takes on an even greater significance than it did during the movie’s post-9/11 milieu. 

What happens when disturbing imagery goes out to millions of people -- young and old alike – instantaneously?  

What are the repercussions for people and communities when this footage is seen, seen again, and then manipulated and disseminated?

Importantly, The Ring conveys this idea of instantaneous information transmission in unforgettable visual terms. The entirety of the story is presented in a kind of de-saturated, silver coloring, an intentional reflection of the twilight, static-laden world of reflected computer monitors or TV light. 

And the film’s bogeyman -- a monstrous child who literally climbs out of a TV set -- is depicted with blurs, hiccups and periodic visual interference. She is a digitized image come to life.  

But this boogeyman is something else too. She is also the ghost of a forgotten emotion (rage) or story, one bouncing around the airwaves, never truly dead, always ready to return.

“It’s about the tape. The one that kills you when you watch it.”

When a teenager girl, Katie, dies exactly seven days after viewing a mysterious VHS tape, her aunt, Rachel Keller, investigates her death.  Rachel finds and watches the tape herself at a mountain cabin, and then realizes, after a phone call, that she has just one week to live.

With help from her estranged boyfriend, Noah (Martin Henderson), Rachel attempts to find the maker of the tape.  

The trail leads back to the Morgan family, who lived and kept horses on Moesko Island. While Rachel attempts to talk to Mr. Morgan, she learns of his daughter, a little girl named Samara (Daveigh Chase) and her incarceration at a local psychiatric facility. Apparently, the girl had frightening psychic powers, including the capacity to burn imagery on X-ray film...or videotape.

Noah visits that facility, but finds that Samara is long gone.

Meanwhile, Rachel must accelerate her efforts to find Samara and end her curse because her sensitive son, Aidan, has also watched the dangerous videotape, and will die in seven days.

“You play it, and it’s like somebody’s nightmare”

As I noted in the introduction above, The Ring is a treatise on modern technology, particularly television. 

The film opens with two teenage girls discussing TV signals and phone signals killing brain cells. “I hate television,” Katie (Amber Tamblyn) says. “It gives me headaches. You know, I heard there are so many magnetic waves traveling through the air, because of TV and telephones, that we're losing ten times as many brain cells as we're supposed to. Like, all the molecules in our heads are all unstable. All the companies know about it, but they're not doing anything about it. It's, like, a big conspiracy.”

This chunk of dialogue reveals a few important points.  

First, it reveals that the girls live in a pervasive culture of distrust. Katie, at least, is fearful that she doesn’t know the truth about how her everyday technology works, and furthermore doesn’t trust the establishment -- government, business, science, or the media -- to explain it truthfully. 

Secondly, Katie's dialogue suggests that modern technology plainly and simply kills, murdering brain cells a little at a time. This urban legend conveys, in a nutshell, the film’s critique of modern technology.  Under the guise of connecting you to those you love, these high-tech instruments actually kill you.

The Ring proves very concerned, indeed, with the idea of signals of an inappropriate or unsafe nature entering your house and your psyche, unbidden.  

Why should the movie obsess on this notion?  Well, in real life, it was a topic of some controversy. America had just been through Bill Clinton’s impeachment hearings, wherein blow jobs were discussed around-the- clock on 24 cable news-stations. I still remember parents complaining about having to explain some of the sexual terminology to their young children.  

And then, soon after that, the 24-hour news stations broadcast hour upon hour of horrific imagery from the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and even the bullet-ridden corpses of Saddam Hussein’s sons.  

Again, how can one explain these events and images to the very young, or the unprepared? Although horror movies when they air on TV must contextualize their visualizations with ratings explaining suitability for the young, newscasts come with no such warnings.

At one point in The Ring, Rachel steps out of her apartment, onto a ledge, and peers down into an adjacent apartment building.  She is the only person standing outside in the vast complex.

The film then cuts to a long, impersonal shot of the building, where it looks as though inhabitants are warehoused.  As the camera focuses on various apartment units, we see that the TV set is prominently placed in each dwelling, and that it is on in every unit as well, depicting some image. 

We see these people and their TV sets, and feel they are blissfully unaware of the world outside their windows. And yet they believe themselves connected to that world because an appliance -- a TV set -- is activated.  The long pan across these living units raises a few questions

What images or terrors are coming into the world over there?  In that apartment? 

Or the next one over?  The impression is that Samara's tape may not be alone in its transmission of pain and suffering.

Later, Rachel’s sensitive son Aidan (David Dorfman) watches Samara’s tape and Rachel is furious at this transgression. 

The pictures on the television have exposed him to images that she was not prepared him to see, and that are dangerous to his psyche and could, literally, do him grave harm.  This scene explicitly trades on a parent’s fears that the air-waves may not be safe for children’s eyes.  

In the post-9/11 world, you can’t leave a kid alone in the front of the TV, because you just don’t know what he or she will see.  Far from being the "babysitter" of a previous generation; a safe generation, the TV now is a portal through which children might see any number of horrors.

On top of such visual flourishes, the film’s main character, Rachel Keller (Naomi Watts) is a journalist, a person responsible for what type of “news” reaches the rest of the world.  

When, during the film's finale, she pushes the copy button and then passes the horror onto someone else, without comment or explanation, Rachel is committed a technological crime of sorts. We expect her to be responsible and moral, given the public trust she holds, but The Ring, again suggests that those in the media are ultimately untrustworthy gate-keepers.  

A child, like Aidan, by contrast, is trustworthy, and at film’s end he asks the question that Rachel willfully ignores: “What about the person we show it to?  What happens to them?”

Mr. Morgan (Brian Cox), Samara’s father, also reserves a high degree of hatred for journalists, as he says to Rachel.  “What is it with you reporters?” He queries. “You take one person's tragedy and force the world to experience it...spread it like sickness.”  

Again, we are left to ponder the nature of contemporary news, and the phenomenon of 24-hour news stations on cable TV. Fox, CNN, and MSNBC jump on a popular story and ride out, regardless of the human or personal toll their reporting exacts.

Much in the way that, a generation earlier, Poltergeist (1982) critiqued television as a portal of evil, The Ring thus positions the new shape of television and media, circa 1999 – 2002 as a technological and inhuman monstrosity.  

This idea is expressed in several scenes which show important action either transmitted on or reflected by the television set.  

Again and again we get compositions of characters watching screens, a fact which indicates the importance of that "act" in our modern culture. At one point, we even get a Goldilocks-type shot with a big-screen/little screen dynamic for Rachel and Aidan.  They are joined in the act of watching something...inappropriate.

Importantly, Samara, it is reported in the film “never sleeps.”  Do you know what else never sleeps? 

A 24-hour cable news channel on TV.

Even the near-ritualistic repeating of Samara’s tape in the film seems to reflect the nature of modern mass media.  

You can check in on CNN every two or three hours and find it replaying the same footage, the same imagery, the same “breaking news” reel.  This was true, as well, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, shortly before The Ring premiered in theaters. A nation’s trauma was recorded, broadcast and rerun day after bloody day, over and over again, and those who saw it felt authentic fear and real trauma even though they were safe, and lived thousands of miles away from Manhattan, or Washington D.C.  

The suffering of the few was spread “like a sickness” and a virus of fear was released into the world at large.  

That virus, eventually, became the Iraq War, a war that would never have occurred had the media not been complicit in drumming up a culture of absolute, pervasive fear.

Steely and silver in color palette, The Ring thus reveals a world in which people -- despite all the connection provided by telephones and television -- feel isolated from one another.  

Noah and Rachel barely talk, and Noah is unwilling to step up as Aidan’s father.  “I don't think I'd make a good father. Maybe it was because my own was... such a... disappointment. Thing is, I don't want anyone else to do it, either, be your father.”  

In other words, Noah doesn’t seem to truly be living, but rather existing in a kind of half-paralyzed, half-awake state.  He wants to be a Dad and he doesn’t want to be a Dad. He has a job, after all...looking at screens all day.

Similarly, Rachel doesn’t listen to Aidan’s teacher, or to Aidan’s worries about death, and Samara’s mother committed suicide.  

Taken all together, this world is a dark place where love seems subdued, but personal traumas spread like wildfire, chain-mail style, via “the tape" and TV monitors.

Samara’s brand of evil also fits the film’s organizing principle, of suffering transmitted to many, like a disease, by modern technology.  

The last thing she sees is a “ring” around the well where she is trapped, and yet a “ring” is also the description of the sound a telephone makes.  The phone rings when Samra reaches out to warn viewers of the tape of their impending demise.  

A “ring” is also a synonym for a circle or loop, and news footage of tragedies are often discussed in terms of being “looped.”  Samara may be physically dead, but her suffering keeps transmitting via phone ring, and via the ring or loop of the tape itself.  

And this is how she wants it.  “Everyone will suffer,” she insists.  In modern culture, and thanks to technology, everyone can experience one person's suffering.  And as often as they would like.

The Ring establishes a new paradigm in the American horror movie involving culpability, and that too is part of it successful artistic gestalt. 

In the 1980s and 1990s, “vice preceded slice and dice.”  That turn of phrase means, simply, that the victim pool in horror movies often brought on their own deaths by breaking moral taboos. They smoked weed, had premarital sex, or snorted coke.  

This paradigm was seen in the slasher formula of the 1980s, but also the Interloper formula of the 1990s, wherein quasi-respectable white men (think: Timothy Hutton in The Temp [1993]) broke “the rules” to get ahead in his profession, only to see the blow-back destroy his family and reputation.

But films like The Ring, The Grudge (2004) and Pulse (2006), suggest something different. 

They suggest that the very act of being present, of watching or seeing is enough to warrant the wrath of angry spirits or individuals.  

In a hyper-connected, globalized world, the act of watching is enough to doom you.  Knowledge of a crime itself becomes the crime. Once you see the "the crime," you are culpable for it, a fact which is reflected in the photographs of the impacted in The Ring.  

Everyone becomes a hideous monster on film because they have "seen" Samara's tape.  They are now carriers of the disease, of the sickness that is spreading, according to Mr. Morgan.

Horror movies are often accused of coarsening the culture, or showcasing imagery that is somehow damaging to a society. Ironically, The Ring makes the reverse case. Consider: horror movies are rated appropriately, and reflect aspects of the society that created them. They are fictional works of art that are about violence in the culture, and how that violence affects people.  

TV news, by contrast, is not safely bounded within an artistic frame-work, or a regulatory one, for that matter. So while the horror film can comment meaningfully on the culture, the media, in its "fair and balanced" reporting, can actually damage it.  It just puts the images out there and leave it to "you" [to] "decide." 

The Japanese original, Ringu (1998) is a remarkable film too, with some big differences from the American version. There, the mystery of the island involves a volcano, not horses.  And the Noah figure, Ryuji, boasts psychic abilities, which helps when contending with Sadako, the film’s version of Samara. But perhaps because it was designed for American audiences, I find The Ring much scarier and on-point about technology than its Japanese predecessor. Both are great horror films, for certain.

In particular, the structure of The Ring, originated in the Japanese film, is clever because it doesn’t reveal the true horror of Samara’s behavior until after Rachel has solved the mystery.  

Until Noah becomes Samara’s victim in the film's last moments, we have seen only snippets of her activity, mainly the gruesome corpses she leaves behind.  

Thus, for the duration of the movie, we can only imagine how, precisely, Samara’s tape is murderous.  But then, all that coiled-up, sustained energy is released in the climactic scene with Noah, and we get to watch Samara’s emergence from the TV -- as a ghost and as a ghost signal -- virtually uninterrupted.  

There are few moments more genuinely disturbing in the American horror cinema of the early 2000s than Samara's escape from the television. Perhaps Samara’s water-logged form, long-hair and herky-jerky “digitized” movements have been aped so often now as to render them ineffective. 

But at the time, Samara’s ascent from the well -- and the TV set -- was a valedictory moment in the horror genre; the moment when the next generation of terror techniques and principles arrived and a new paradigm was born.

The Ring also develops well the notion of inevitability, of a “ring” of repeating events. 

You see the tape, and then you see the images of the tape in real life, until, finally, you meet Samara and she kills you. Accordingly, imagery from the tape including a ladder, water running blood-red, a fly, and an oval mirror, all recur progressively during Rachel’s investigation. The question becomes: were they already there, or are they a side-effect of Rachel’s vision; of her life re-shaping to the imagery that Samara has forged from her mind?

The Ring is an unnerving and disturbing film, made more so by the fact that it very much considers how we live in the 21st century, and wonders about all images that we have transmitted and committed to the ether.  

Could they come back to haunt us?

CULT MOVIE REVIEW: Shikoku (1999)

"Do a person's feelings...have to die with them?"

- Sayori, in Shikoku (1999)

This Japanese film by director Shunichi Nagasaki is one of the few post-Ringu horrors that hasn't yet been remade and repackaged in America.

And that's probably a good thing, since Shikoku doesn't trade so much on shocks and suspense as it does powerful human emotions like...love, loneliness and longing. Make no mistake, Shikoku is a frightening genre film in many ways; but it focuses very intently (and grimly) on the meaning of death; and the things that death can take away from those left behind; those still living.

Shikoku depicts the tale of lovely, timid Hinako (Natsukara Yui), a girl who moved away from the island of Shikoku as a child, leaving behind two best friends: a boy named Fumiya (Tsutsui Michitaka), and the object of his affections, Sayori (Kuriyama Chiyaki), a girl with extraordinary powers as a spiritual medium. Like all women in the Hiura family, Sayori is able to let the dead speak through her, and in one horrifying session, a boy inhabits the young girl and tells his grieving parents "I want to get out of here." "Here" being a reference to the Land of the Dead.

Hinako returns to Shikoku as an adult, only to learn that Sayori drowned some years earlier...at the age of sixteen. Fumiya has never been the same since her death, and nor has Sayori's obsessed mother, the last in a long line of priestesses serving on the island. In fact, Sayori's grieving mother has undertaken a strange quest: she is visiting all 88 shrines on the island sixteen times, but in the "reverse" order of the ritual. As Hinako and Fumiya soon discover (from an unpublished, secret book called The Ancient History of Shikoku...), this backwards pilgrimage can transform the island into the Land of the Dead. In fact, in a forested valley, there may be a cave leading to "Yomi," the underworld.

Hinako and Fumiya grow intimate as they learn more about the opening of the doorway to the dead; and there's an amazing scene in the second act in which Fumiya describes to Hinako the depth of his love for Sayori, even though she is long gone. Will he ever really love anyone else? Is he "ruined," because of his early loss? Can he love Hinako the same way that he loves Sayori? This scene is filled with deep, honest emotions, yet never mawkish. It's restrained, and yet the words are heart-wrenching and heart-felt. American movies don't often let characters talk this way; and if they do, it seems corny, or forced. But after this fascinating scene, we realize that Shikoku is a love triangle. Though one point of the triangle is dead and gone, in some senses she still wields the most power.

And then, inevitably, the doorway to the Land of the Dead opens, and Fumiya makes a fateful choice between the living and the dead. His selection is shocking, but right given his character's situation and the undying power of love.

Shikoku eschews flashy pyrotechnics and culminates with a surprise: a long, in-depth conversation between a dead girl, Sayori, and the two friends she left behind on this mortal coil. She's sort of delusional in her "dead state." Sayori believes that she and Fumiya can still have children and carry on the family line. But of course, that's impossible. And Sayori -- very much like the resurrected individuals of Pet Sematary (1989) -- has only one gift remaining that she can endow upon the mortal friends. Death.

There's a real, heart-felt, human dimension to Shikoku that remains incredibly appealing and intriguing. Death brings out different instincts in people. Some deny it. Some grieve it. And some people just categorically refuse to accept death. But, there are consequences, we are told, to changing the natural order of things, and some of those consequences play out in the film.

To provide a crude comparison, Shikoku is like Ghost (1990) without all the sentimental New Age crap. Unlike Ghost, this film doesn't aim to satisfy us merely with the belief that "we take the love with us" to the after life. Instead it asks questions about regret and fate. It pauses long enough for the dead to ask questions of the living. Like "Why did I have to be the one who never got to grow up?"

These are the questions of our mortal existence; of human tragedy, and Shikoku dwells on them. It cannot, however, answer these questions since the great unknown must remain...unknown. But the film is atmospheric and dread-filled because it gazes at the mystery of the beyond; at one intersection of the land of the living and the land of the dead.

Shikoku is a beautifully-realized horror film. At times, a hand-held camera makes us actually feel a part of the land. This is especially so in the case of the river where Hinako almost dies; and where Sayori drowns. These shots are almost always filmed from water level, so it's as though we're up to our necks in it; drowning too. In other scenes, after Sayori has returned from the dead (arising through a small pool of water...), the water always seems to be reflecting upon her person; whether she is actually in it or not. Shunichi Nagasaki is also crafty in the way he shoots the Sayori specter: He shows her eyes and face very infrequently; Sayori seems ever-present...but distant to us. Often, she is turned away with her back to the camera; or appears on her knees (below camera level), preserving the mystery of a returnee from the grave. One line in the film tells the audience that "the newly dead come stand by your bed," and a shiver-invoking scene puts that line to the test.

At the end of Shikoku, Hinako is informed that she will be the one "who lives." She thus leaves Shikoku, gazing back at the mountain which might just be the gateway to another world.

But after everything Shikoku shows us and reveals to us, it's not relief the audience feels at her survival. On the contrary, it feels as though Hinako is the one who has been left behind. Her demons, like Fumiya's, will continue to haunt her. Especially if love survives the grave.