Halloween Horrorfest 2018: MAREBITO (2004)

This is one strange little movie.  I can’t even tell you what it is.  Is it a vampire movie?  An unreliable narrator tale?  A descent into madness?  Some trip to the afterlife?  A Lovecraftian love story?

Well, yes.

This confusion is all the more odd for how simple the narrative really is.  There’s this videographer, Masuoka (played by famed director of Tetsuo, Shin'ya Tsukamoto) who becomes obsessed with a suicide he caught on tape.  His investigation leads him to explore the underground ruins of pre-WWII Tokyo...where he is led by the ghost of the suicide to The Mountains of Madness.  Exploring this landscape, he comes across a naked girl chained to a cave wall  He decides to free her and take her home.  The woman is non-verbal, has sharp canine teeth and only drinks blood.  The man decides to keep the girl as something of a pet, but has to take extreme methods to keep her healthy.

Fairly straightforward, if a little weird, right?  But there’s also the man in the trenchcoat who shows up at inopportune times to warn Masuoka...and this woman who keeps following him, demanding he let her see her daughter...and the glimpses of these creatures that are supposedly robots....and these moments where faces around Masuoka blur or the background glitches.  It also is telling that in the first act, our hero mentions offhandedly that he’s off his Prozac.

Marebito is impenetrable most of the time, and I wonder how much of it is just my unfamiliarity with Japanese cultural mores.  Director Takashi Shimizu frequently switches from film to video, and it’s obvious perception is a big deal in this movie.  What we see is not necessarily what we get, and what we get is wide open to interpretation.  Tsukamoto’s performance is very low-key, to the point where we almost believe a revelation that’s brought out and never mentioned again.  And I was very impressed by Tomomi Miyashita, who plays the strange feral creature.  Even though the film forgoes special make-up effects, she manages to create the sense that this is some thing that just happens to look human.  One of the most disquieting sequences shows Masuoka leading her through the mall, and her body language is amazing.

I really don’t know whether to recommend this or not.  It’s certainly the most unusual of the films I’ve run across, and I get the feeling that repeated viewing might unveil new insights.  It’s definitely a film that stays with you and makes you consider things it has to say.  So if you’re in the right mood and open to something unusual, you could do worse than watch this.