Adapted from a horror comic by Junji Ito, this debut feature from Japanese music-video director Higuchinsky begins eerily but doesn't take long to descend into silliness.
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04/18/07
Uzumaki (2002)
55 %
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted: 22
Fresh: 12
Rotten:10
Average Rating: 6.2/10
Consensus: Uzumaki uses its creepy, David Lynch-inspired atmospherics to effectively build a sense of dread, but ultimately fails to do anything with it.
Runtime: 90 mins
Genre: Foreign Films
Theatrical Release: May 1, 2002 Limited
Synopsis: Based on a Japanese comic book, Higuchinsky's UZUMAKI follows the residents of a remote town as they inexplicably become obsessed with spiral shapes. Kirie (Eriko Hatsune), a young schoolgirl, first notices this phenomena when she... [More]
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Reviews for Uzumaki
Top Critic
'Uzumaki is a masterfully rendered living portrait of warped, apocalyptic art...'
05/01/04
Mostly the film creates an infectious feeling of apprehension that slowly crawls up your spine.
01/15/04
Special effects can be tastefully managed even on a shoestring budget, but here they are merely ludicrous.
11/03/02
Gussied up with so many distracting special effects and visual party tricks that it's not clear whether we're supposed to shriek or laugh.
10/03/02
Top Critic Succumb to its creepy charms, and you’ll never see inner-ear anatomy diagrams, umbrellas, or escargot in quite the same way. You might even hand over laundry chores to someone else.
09/09/02
Eerie and slimy enough to give Tim Burton nightmares, Uzumaki is a superb piece of fantasy cinema.
08/26/02
A somewhat satisfying, because of its uniqueness, but ultimately empty horror chiller.
07/23/02
Required viewing for horror fans, Japanese-cult-cinema fans, and anyone who digs settling in for an unsettling David Lynch evening.
07/12/02
... less a story than an inexplicable nightmare, right down to the population's shrugging acceptance to each new horror.
07/12/02
Uzumaki’s interesting social parallel and defiant aesthetic seems a prostituted muse...
06/10/02
Beautiful, cold, oddly colorful and just plain otherworldly, a freaky bit of art that's there to scare while we delight in the images.
05/31/02
One of the film’s strongest achievements is the way it manages to get so much mileage out of such a simple concept as spirals.
05/25/02
Ultimately the, yes, snail-like pacing and lack of thematic resonance make the film more silly than scary, like some sort of Martha Stewart decorating program run amok.
05/15/02
Top Critic Got a David Lynch jones? Then you'd do well to check this one out because it's straight up Twin Peaks action...
05/10/02
A surreal fairy tale that coils in on itself like a slow-motion whirlpool and achieves an atmosphere of sublime creepiness without ever precisely making sense.
05/03/02
At some point, all this visual trickery stops being clever and devolves into flashy, vaguely silly overkill.
05/01/02
Top Critic Things really get weird, though not particularly scary: the movie is all portent and no content.
05/01/02
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