Dear friend,

do years in the Gregorian calendar represent anything personal in our lives? I am considering, very humbly, changing my chronological references (at least for this series of posts) to a date in A.P. (Anno Pauli). That would be a more faithful indication of how my film-viewing relates to my years of experience in life. But that would also expose, indirectly, my birth date every week, and I’m not super-comfortable with this. I’ll reflect longer about it.

Tomie vs Tomie/富江VS富江, written and directed by Tomohiro Kubo, from Junji Ito’s manga, Japan, 2007 - ⭐⭐

By this point, it is legitimate to ask the question: why am I doing this to myself? Completionism, I guess? After all, there is just one film to go in this series. I can do it. Anyway, I ploughed on through this film, even though I’m not really sure how the different bits stick together: the protagonist is scarred by the death of his girlfriend, who (I am told, I didn’t realise this) looks exactly like (one) Tomie, so he rejects Tomie’s advances… and there’s another Tomie but she only appears in two scenes and it felt they just had to justify an intriguing title. Which is more than they did for most of the other films, in fairness. A rebirth scene right at the end was nice. And dummies are always creepy.

The Grudge, directed by Takashi Shimizu, co-written with Stephen Susco, US, 2004 - ⭐⭐⭐

This is the movie that introduced Kayako and Toshio to Western audiences, by the intercession of Sarah Michelle Gellar. Shimizu remixes in a single film the main points of Ju-On: The Curse and Ju-On: The Grudge, with higher production values and a mostly American cast; the result, for me, is at the same time a bit jarring (I understand a senior Japanese woman would sleep in a futon on the ground floor… would Grace Zabriskie do the same?) and (for me) more disquieting. There’s also a clear focus on making the film accessible to the American public, although the ‘origin story’ of the curse is much meaner in the original Ju-On.

Incantation/, directed by Kevin Ko, co-written with Zhang Zhe Wai, Taiwan, 2022 - ⭐⭐⭐⭐ 🔄

Well, it’s confirmed that nobody else likes this film. For me, it’s more unsettling than 95% of the horror films I’ve watched. The climax of the flashback sequence is just… terrifying, and it couldn’t be achieved with anything else than a first-person point of view. So I’m happy to trade this for some liberties taken with the ‘found footage’ format.

Baby Ruby, written and directed by Bess Wohl, US, 2022 - ⭐⭐

I guess this film’s heart is in the right place, but everything else, unfortunately, is not. It’s an idea that would have required more refinement to be transformed into a good film. It’s like the writer defined a series of elements to try and make the story work (the isolated house; the lead character - Noémie Merlant who is an ‘internet influencer’ - so everybody knows everything about her; she’s also away from her Country, which makes her more isolated and prone to cultural misunderstandings; a husband - Kit Harington - who is a butcher, so the fact he walks around covered in blood can be ambiguous), but then didn’t successfully amalgamate them together; the result is a sequence of ‘scary’ thoughts that go in many different directions instead of building up to an effective story.

Lisa Frankenstein, directed by Zelda Williams, written by Diablo Cody, US, 2024 - ⭐⭐⭐½

I watched this on Saturday night, after a nice dinner with friends, so I was quite tired and possibly a little bit inebriated: the fact that the animated opening credits/prologue required me to pay attention to two things at once was not a good start for my exhausted brain; the same goes for the loud songs that play during the first part of the film. Later on, though, the pace relaxed, and I must admit that this not-very-serious romantic and classic-Tim-Burtonesque story won me over, not in small part thanks to the always dependable Kathryn Newton.