“Marebito,” the latest movie by the Japanese horror auteur Takashi Shimizu (“Ju-on: The Grudge”), is in some ways a modest film, with a tiny cast, a 92-minute running time, minimal effects and a grainy, homemade look.
At the same time, though, it encompasses a dizzying range of conceits and half-formed ideas. Fans of the J-horror genre will find familiar motifs, none of them explored with much novelty or depth. The uncanny power of the video image is explored (the protagonist is a cameraman), as is the ability of sound effects to create moods of dread and apprehension. There are pale, ghostly women, enough blood to transfuse a small city and an atmosphere of urban loneliness and sullen psychosexual pathology.
None of which is quite as much fun – or quite as disturbing – as it should be. Some of Shimizu’s images are unsettling, in particular those shot in handheld, consumer-grade video. But there are few moments of genuine shock or impact. Masuoka, the sad-faced hero, fancies himself a connoisseur of terror, so much so that he regards the ordinary fear of death as “mediocre.” But in casting about for new sources of fear, “Marebito” achieves its own level of mediocrity.
One day, Masuoka (played by Shinya Tsukamoto, director of the low-budget science-fiction cult masterpiece “Tetsuo”), who lives in a small apartment jammed with video screens, films a suicide in a Tokyo subway.
Studying scenes of the incident, he concludes there is a secret world beneath the city, inhabited by evil robots. This theory, which has a precedent in the work of the science-fiction writer Richard Shaver, turns out to be true. Or almost. At any rate, the tunnels below Tokyo house talkative ghosts and strange, white-skinned humanoid creatures who skitter around on all fours.
There is also a young woman (Tomomi Miyashita) chained naked to a wall, whom Masuoka takes home and keeps as a kind of feral pet, feeding her human blood out of a baby bottle, and also from cuts he inflicts on himself with a box cutter.
“I liked it,” he says in his voiceover. “I wanted to keep feeding her until she was satisfied. Even if it meant my own death.”
Whatever turns you on. As those remarks suggest, “Marebito” is thick with metaphors that are at once obvious and obscure. Shimizu does not explore the connections between sex, fear, violence and madness so much as he takes them for granted, figuring that vampirism, videotape and dank, dim corridors will somehow combine to create sensation, if not sense.
Sense is not required – horror movies can do just fine without it – but some sensation other than boredom and an occasional grimace of disgust might be nice.
** | “Marebito”
R for nudity and extreme violence|1 hour, 32 minutes|JAPANESE HORROR|Directed by Takashi Shimizu; written by Chiaki Konaka; in Japanese with subtitles; photography by Tsukasa Tanabe; starring Shinya Tsukamoto, Tomomi Miyashita, Kazuhiro Nakahara, Miho Ninagawa, Shun Sugata|Opens today at Starz FilmCenter.
