Marebito (2005)

Cryptic, self-important pabulum, Marebito is just a cheap side project between the Grudge movies, as admitted by Takashi Shimizu himself. There's nothing like hiding a low budget and a total lack of ideas behind smoke, mirrors and psychobabble; J-horror in general does this, but it seems particularly fatuous here, as the film flirts with some concepts that would make it seem deep but really are complete dead ends. It name-drops Madame Blavatsky, Kaspar Hauser AND M.C. Escher in a span of about five minutes, but the climactic action is a schoolgirl getting stabbed on video camera, so there's a clear conflict of interest here. It's as if the movie thinks it's hot shit for flashing its intellectual feathers and then turning around and SHOCKING YOU with left-field violence, but seriously, zzzzz. This isn't to discredit Marebito completely, though. Maybe it's my long-standing bias for the genre, but it does achieve a basic sense of intrigue. There are some pretty sharp visual representations of voyeurism and the unknown, and the horror imagery sometimes works (but sometimes doesn't, such as the ridiculous-looking man in sunglasses). The performances are a mixed bag. Shinya Tsukamoto is bad as the insulated, unhinged loner, unable to rein in his inherent ridiculousness. Tomomi Miyashita fares better as F, although the part's degrading and not particularly wide expressively. They don't really seem to have much chemistry, which really causes the ending to fall flat, much like Marebito's other attempts to shock. It's a little bit more brutal than most of its compatriots, but also a lot dumber and a lot cheaper, and its attempts to depict madness really just make it risible. I can't recommend this to much of anyone, unless you're a total J-horror completist.