Weekly visions - week 45, 2024

Inugami , written and directed by Masato Harada, from a novel by Masako Bando, Japan, 2001 - ⭐⭐⭐½

This film was unexpectedly a love story with familiar drama, with some revelations that are quite predictable (maybe subtitles make unremarkable comments sound like important clues, which in this case they are), and one that I had not seen coming. We are back on Shikoku island, which again is the setting for a folk horror story and its curses, rituals, and paper - lots of paper. Even through the very bad resolution of the streaming copy I could find, it looked beautiful. I may not buy the boxset, but I’d like a Blu-ray of this movie anyway.

St. John’s Wort , directed by Ten Shimoyama, co-written with Gorô Nakajima and Takenori Sentô, from the visual novel Otogirisō by Shūkei Nagasaka, Japan, 2001 - ⭐⭐

The next film in the collection is adapted from a ‘visual novel’ published for the Super Famicom platform, and what’s more Japanese than that? The plot also involves the creation of a new videogame by a team of developers, two of which, formerly a couple, go and look for inspiration in the old decrepit mansion where one of them used to live, before her family dissolved. Her father was a renowned (fictional) painter, whose works I actually quite liked in the disturbing way I like Francis Bacon’s art. But it turns out that this guy was considerably more problematic than Bacon, and the house has many secrets.
For some reason, the girl decides that it’s a good idea to take a shower (apparently hot water still works in this house) in the filthiest bathroom ever.
Contrary to the very negative reviews I’ve found, I thought it was relatively interesting and atmospheric - despite the videogame inserts -, at least until the unsatisfying five-minute pay-off. But the screenwriters must have been very proud of it, because they show it twice.
Instead of the usual ballad over the closing credits, this one has a rock song that may or may not know it’s actually Hotel California in disguise.

Carved: The Slit-Mouthed Woman , directed by Koji Shiraishi, co-written with Naoyuki Yokota, Japan, 2007 - ⭐⭐⭐

Carved brings to the screen the urban legend of the Kuchisake-onna, the woman with her mouth covered who stops men on the street to ask them if they find her beautiful, only to reveal a ‘why so serious’ smile - and then kill them. In this film, every kid in town is obsessed with this story even before an earthquake (again the real villain, after ISOLA), frees the real Kuchisake-onna from a long sleep, and she starts kidnapping children.
It’s not a pleasant film, as it depicts (though keeping it just out of frame) disturbing abuse to kids, which is puzzling because that’s not the modus operandi of the character from the urban legend. I’m also perplexed by the idea that, in this world, all women are potential child abusers, and men are all good.
It’s also unintentionally very funny, for instance when the demon (spoiler alert) possesses other women by not only replacing their bodies, but also their clothes, Agent-Smith style, trench-coat and all. Or when she spends minutes listlessly kicking people on the ground, with the same energy as The Horribly Slow Murderer with the Extremely Inefficient Weapon .
But it’s the first film in the collection that felt a bit scary and unnerving. Good thing I’ve only watched it now, when the chance of meeting someone wearing a surgical mask is much lower than a couple of years ago.

The Substance , written and directed by Coralie Fargeat, France/United Kingdom/US, 2024 - ⭐⭐⭐½

I haven’t had an experience like this in a cinema for a long time, or ever: a half-packed room (normally the screenings I go to have much fewer people than that), with people that kept coming in even after an hour since the film had started. And only at the very end of the film, while I was repeating in my head ‘please make it stop’ and the guy sitting in front of me simply had decided that Twitter was a less scary place than this cinema, a couple of older people left.
Not that the long sequences of extreme close-ups on Sue’s body had been less disturbing.
I was fully on board with this film until around two-thirds of its running time, but when things become too grotesque, I get bored and annoyed.
Subtlety is an art I enjoy much more than extremity, but that’s just my taste. Maybe extremity is needed today. But I don’t see the point of it.

Candyman , written and directed by Bernard Rose, adapted from the short story The Forbidden by Clive Barker, US, 1992 - ⭐⭐⭐½

The death of Tony Todd convinced me to finally rent and watch the original Candyman. Despite the minor spoilers deriving from having previously watched Nia DaCosta’s requel, the film is not at all what I imagined it would be: I expected a slasher (I had forgotten this was originally a Clive Barker short story), instead I got a possession horror with Phantom of the Opera elements, that has no interest in applying any logic to its story but whatever it does, it’s as mesmerising as Todd’s deep reverberated voice.

The Haunting of Hill House , created and directed by Mike Flanagan, adapted from the novel by Shirley Jackson, US, 2018 - ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ (up from ⭐⭐⭐⭐)

Between the end of October and the beginning of November, I went back and watched the Netflix series that made the world fall in love with Mike Flanagan, and convinced me that I could watch horrors after all.
Despite the fact that hours of horror films have played in front of my eyes by now, Hill House’s scares still managed to affect me as it was the first time: the first glimpse of the Bent-Neck Lady, Nell’s silent scream at the end of episode 1, the delayed pay-off of the runny eyes speech (I thought I had imagined it), that jump scare in the car that I knew was coming and still pushed me violently against the back of my sofa. Plus all the emotional effect we now know Flanagan is so good at, culminating with the masterclass of the long takes in the Two Storm episode.