IGX

Sing the praises of Lynch and Cronenberg all you want (and I do like both of those guys a lot) - nobody does "disturbing and fucked up" like the Japanese.

I saw this on IFC last night, looked it up on IMDb today. It was made by the director in about 8 days, and he shot it on digital film to give it the grainy, jagged quality that contributes so much to the film's atmosphere. It's a horror film about a Japanese cameraman who goes off his medication (and may or may not have committed a horrible crime against his family) and then proceeds on a field trip into the bowels of an almost empty Lovecraftian wasteland, guided by the psychotic hallucination of a man who he watched commit suicide by stabbing himself in the eye.

He comes back from the depths with a young woman - or something that appears to be a young woman - who sleeps 20 hours a day, won't eat,,,and in fact can only thrive when she is allowed to drink human blood. She's not really a "feral" blood drinker, though - she/it just kind of looks at the protagonist with her need plainly in her eyes. (Think more of a "succubus", only needy and helpless and mute and gothick-y and emo.)
He tries to understand her, but the process seems to make his life even more unworkable. (I think that his attempts to provide her with blood, including murders of other people, push him even further over the edge.)

The protagonist finally sort of loses his nerve and leaves the girl/thing in his apartment while he tries to make some kind of sense of WTF is going on with his inner life and his seeming need to experience "true horror". His perceptions continue to change and evolve as he proceeds through the film.

The ending is subtle and has a lot of subtext in it...sort of like the weird identity shift things that were happening in Lynch's "Lost Highway". You could even say it's an, ahem, "happy ending" of sorts, because in the end he gets what he thinks he wants, even though the expression on his face is enough to make you want to bleach your mind. I had to queue up and watch 20 minutes of a Jean Claude Van Damme film ("Hard Target") to shake off the creeps afterwards.

Hell of an interesting film. It's not really all that "violent" or bloody or shocking (even though there are severl murders in it), but it's sick and morbid and fey (in the sense of being doomed) and decadent as all get out. It's different enough from most US horror and terror output to be worth seeing for its own sake. Rank it right up there with Polanski's classic "Repulsion".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marebito

Abandoned by Wolves wrote:Sing the praises of Lynch and Cronenberg all you want (and I do like both of those guys a lot) - nobody does "disturbing and fucked up" like the Japanese.

Damn straight. The Japs are seriously fucked up in the head when it comes to horror movies.

Have you seen any of their porn? These guys go way beyond fucked up? They make the Germans blush they're so bad.

BB2/75