Black Gate

I settled in at the Hall Theatre on the evening of Sunday, July 29, to watch a movie about which I knew little. I knew it was Japanese, I knew it was titled One Cut of the Dead (Kamera o tomeru na!, カメラを止めるな！), and I knew it was written and directed by Shinichiro Ueda. The movie ended up being excellent and even uplifting. But writing about it presents a challenge.

(Before the feature there was a short called “Crying Bitch.” Written and directed by Reiki Tsuno, it follows a man who tries to break up with his mistress while his wife is becoming a literal monster. Things don’t go as planned for him all down the line. It has some effective physical comedy and unexpected moments.)

One Cut of the Dead is a movie that starts out one way, and then a bit past the half-hour mark reveals that it’s something other than the one-cut zombie comedy-thriller we thought we were watching. In an ideal world, viewers would go into the film blind, I suppose. In this world, I’d like to actually write about what I saw; and in any event I didn’t go in blind, exactly, and that didn’t hurt my experience of the film. So I’ll say that if you want to have a real surprise, don’t read further in this review. But do see the film if you want to watch a comedy with a few horror elements. I think it is worth pointing out that this isn’t a zombie movie, as such, for all its initial appearances.

Let’s start with that first half-hour take. We’re watching a zombie movie being made, with a manic director (Takayuki Hamatsu), a couple young fresh-faced stars, and assorted crew including a makeup lady (Harumi Shuhama). What we’re watching is being filmed in one take, the camera roaming around as various people drift by in the old abandoned warehouse where the movie’s set. And then there’s a zombie attack for real, and the director loves it.

But there’s something weird about this movie. Sure, we see a cameraman, but who’s filming the cameraman? Dialogue’s random, setting things up that never seem to get paid off. Everything moves very well, and it’s a fun film to watch, but one might think it all feels a little ramshackle. And then the twist comes that explains what we’ve just seen.

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Sunday, July 29, was an intriguing day. Not so much because of the first movie I planned to see, an anime called Penguin Highway about a young boy investigating the mysterious appearance of penguins in his small Japanese town. But because of the second screening, the International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase 2018. It’d present eight films, and having seen prior editions of the showcase, I knew how unpredictable it would be.

First, though, was Penguin Highway (ペンギン・ハイウェイ). It’s the first feature from director Hiroyasu Ishida. The script’s by Makoto Ueda, adapting a novel by Tomihiko Morimi (which is scheduled to appear soon in an English translation from Yen Press). Ueda also wrote the script for another animated adaptation of a Morimi novel, Night Is Short, Walk On Girl. This one’s quite different from that film, though.

It’s about a boy, Aoyama (voiced by Kana Kita), living in a village where penguins start to appear from no known source. Aoyama, a brilliant and scientifically-inclined child who writes down everything that happens to him in his notebooks along with all his thoughts and analyses, decides to solve the mystery of the penguins. Complicating things is his crush on a never-named adult woman (voice of Yu Aoi, who appeared in live-action in Tokyo Ghoul and Japanese Girls Never Die aka Haruko Azumi is Missing) and a classmate, Hamamoto (Megumi Han) who has a crush on Aoyama.

Penguin Highway begins by adding a bit of surrealism to everyday life, but appears unsure where to go from there. Probably the best thing in the film is its depiction of Aoyama, a charmingly arrogant fourth-grader who’s counting the days until he wins his Nobel Prize in some scientific field. He comes off as rigid and overly logical in a way that feels believable, with a self-assurance that’s refreshing and also credible given his intellect. Unfortunately, this rationality’s sometimes overplayed, notably later in the film when he tries to apply his scientific instincts to analysing love. (Are you surprised to hear that this doesn’t work?)

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The last movie I saw on Saturday, July 28, was at the Hall Theatre. It was Punk Samurai Slash Down (Panku Samurai Kirarete Soro, パンク侍、斬られて候), an adaptation of Ko Machida’s 2004 novel directed by Gakuryu Ishii and scripted by Kankuro Kodo (who also wrote Too Young To Die!). It’s a period story about a wandering samurai, Junoshin Kake (Go Ayano, also at Fantasia this year as Sato in Ajin: Demi-Human), who concocts a scheme to get himself hired as a retainer of the Kurokaze Han noble house. He kills an old man, and convinces one faction of the Kurokaze Han, led by Shuzen Oura (veteran Jun Kunimura, whose string of credits include The Wailing as well as this year’s Destiny: The Tale of Kamakura) that the dead man was an agent of a suppressed group of heretics called the Belly-Shaking cult. The cult believes that the world has been eaten by a gigantic tapeworm. The ideal is to be excreted from the tapeworm, which is brought about by shaking the belly. But the contempt for the world also has led the cult to massive rioting and cruel criminal acts in the past; the spectre of their revival is terrifying — until it turns out to be false, and Kake’s threatened with execution. Unless he can prove himself “innocent” by secretly bringing the cult into existence, which would also enhance the credibility of Oura’s political faction. He sets out to create the threat he’s warned against, and things rapidly spiral out of control.

This is a very odd movie; it doesn’t simply begin strangely, but continually increase its oddness at each point when you think you’ve begun to assimilate what it’s doing. The scale increases, as well, as the Belly-Shaker cult grows beyond all expectation and a wholly unexpected other faction emerges. Ultimately the film ends in a cosmic battle of thousands of samurai and their allies against the Belly-Shaker cult, and perhaps it’s a mark of success that the large-scale battle scene never overwhelms the satirical tone of the film but ends up supporting it. Without actually being Gilliam-like there’s a bit of a feel to the ending of a Gilliam movie, wild exuberance petering out into a knowing anti-climax.

There is a range of tones to the movie, though, and Kake is enough of a coherent character to engage an audience. Conversely, there’s a narrator (Masatoshi Nagase) telling the story in part through voice-over, providing another perspective; eventually we find out who this seemingly-omniscient narrator is, and learn he’s actually embedded in the story. Nobody’s above the fray, nobody’s out of the world of the film — even those trying to get themselves out of the world entirely. The gnostic leanings of the Belly-Shaker cult feel something out of a Philip K. Dick story, a paranoiac danger that might actually understand reality better than anyone would like. Except they’re the villains; and except that the nominal heroes aren’t heroic either, as the first thing we see Kake do is kill a man in cold blood. Ayano’s charismatic enough that we tend to forget this enough to accept him as a protagonist, but the movie doesn’t. (And this does come back to him in a telegraphed bit of poetic justice.)

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Saturday, July 28, saw me arrive at the Hall Theatre early for a showing of the Japanese historical fantasy Laughing Under the Clouds, yet another manga adaptation. Following that, I’d head across the street to the J.A. De Sève Theatre, where I’d watch a short film showcase called Afromentum. It’d feature four short films by Black filmmakers from around the world — including an adaptation of Nnedi Okorafor’s short story “Hello, Moto.”

Laughing Under the Clouds (Donten ni warau, 曇天に笑う) was directed by Katsuyuki Motohiro, whose excellent adaptation Ajin: Demi-Human I’d just seen the evening before. The script was written by Yûya Takahashi from the manga by Kemuri Karakara. In the 19th century, a trio of brothers in a Japanese village guard against the return of a terrible dragon. The eldest, Tenka Kumo (Sota Fukushi) is a highly-skilled fighter; his younger brother Soramaru (Yuma Nakayama) is nowhere near as good; the third, Chutaro (Kirato Wakayama) is just a child. But agents of the dragon are at work, and the creature will rise soon. Can the Kumos stand against it?

This is a disappointing movie. After seeing Ajin I had great respect for Motohiro’s skills, and I’d appreciated Fukushi’s work in other movies this year: The Travelling Cat Chronicles, Bleach, and Laplace’s Witch. But things don’t come together here. There are some very nice moments, including a splashy opening scene, but this movie doesn’t work as a whole. The characters are unconvincing, it tries to fit too much into a 94-minute running time, and the conclusion’s an extended anti-climax.

The problem, I think, comes from the core trio of brothers, and the way the movie envisions them. Soramaru’s interesting because he’s fallible in a way that Tenka isn’t, but it’s not clear why he isn’t as good a fighter as Tenka if Tenka’s been teaching him. This power difference drives the plot. The ages of the characters aren’t stated, but there’s only a year difference between the two actors, and Nakayama certainly looks like an adult in his early 20s — shouldn’t he be at least close to Tenka in skill? But he isn’t, and he’s frustrated, and so at one point he abandons his brothers to go train with a group of government agents who are rivals to the Kumos. The stakes of the rivalry seem petty next to the danger of the dragon, though, so this never really feels especially dramatic.

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I had two movies to see on Friday, July 29. The first, perfectly fitting the small De Sève Theatre, was The Witch in the Window, a quiet character-centred horror film. The second was another live-action manga adaptation, Ajin: Demi-Human, a fast-paced explosion-oriented semi-super-hero story which fit the larger Hall Theatre as well as The Witch in the Window suited the De Sève. I had certain hopes for both, and in both cases those hopes were wildly exceeded. These are two excellent movies, of very different kinds.

The Witch in the Window is written and directed by Andy Mitton, whose very fine film We Go On I saw two years ago at Fantasia. Like that movie, this is a humanistic and even warm horror film, a personal meditation on fear and death. The Witch In the Window follows Simon (Alex Draper), a divorced father who has bought a house in the Vermont countryside; he plans to fix it up and flip it for a profit. To help him make over the house he brings along his son, 12-year-old Finn (Charlie Tacker). Finn recently slipped his mother’s control online and saw something deeply disturbing, so Simon hopes to bond with him as they work on the house. Finn’s less interested in this, but in any case Simon’s plans have an unexpected complication: the house is, allegedly, haunted, by an old woman who was a previous occupant and died staring out an upper window. As the two work on the house, the presence in the house becomes impossible to ignore. Can either escape the witchery of the spirit?

This is very much a classic haunted house movie, with a definite old-fashioned (but intensely effective) approach. There are no jump scares. There is no gore whatsoever. We are frightened for these characters because we are frightened for these characters. We know them, we care about them, we don’t want to see horror-movie things happen to them. It takes a certain kind of self-assuredness to try to make that sort of horror film, I think, and here it pays off. This is a movie that dares to bring the traditional haunted-house story into the modern day. It doesn’t shy away from cell phones and the internet — in fact, a cell phone’s central to one of the film’s spookiest moments. The movie’s not afraid of the modern world, which is something it embraces in its story, something resonant with its themes: the refurbishing of the old, the evocation and transformation of a spirit.

Note that the cinematography’s accordingly excellent, as it must be: atmospheric yet precise, establishing both age and technology as needed, old wood and power tools and portable lights. There’s a sense of the architecture of the house, of its layout, of its narrowness and shadows. There’s a sense of the forested grounds around it, warm and green yet isolating. The sunlight of Vermont, its moods and angles, is captured so well as to almost be another character. The framing’s unobtrusively correct; the film grammar here is as knowing in its tones as the prose of an M. R. James story. This is a movie confident enough to let some of its most frightening moments (especially early on) happen without drawing attention to them. If you’re observant, you’ll notice certain things in the frame that the characters do not, and as they play out the scene oblivious to the horror watching them the tension grows, and you can only wait, and wait, and wait.

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On the evening of Thursday, July 26, I made my way to the Cinémathèque Québécois, well east of the main Fantasia theatres, for a screening of a film classic. Fantasia was presenting Mario Bava’s classic 1964 horror-mystery film Blood and Black Lace (Sei donne per l’assassino). It’s one of the first giallo films, a genre of surreal thriller particularly identified with Italian directors. This was the original 88-minute Italian version, restored by Arrow Films for their recent blu-ray edition of the film.

First came a short written and directed by Frédéric Chalté, “Le otto dita della morte.” It’s a trailer for a never-made giallo film, and a fun four-minute run-through of the genre hallmarks. Full, rich colour; split-screen images; a gloved hand; it’s a clever homage to the giallo tradition. The soundtrack was I thought particularly strong.

Bava’s Blood and Black Lace has a script by Bava, Giuseppe Barilla, and Marcello Fondato concerning murders in and around a fashion house. The house, managed by the duo of Max Morlan (Cameron Mitchell) and his lover, the Countess Christina Como (Eva Bartok), is based in a rich old mansion and employs a number of beautiful models, one of whom, Isabella (Francesca Ungaro), is murdered by a killer in a featureless mask. Her diary comes to light, a key to the secrets of the fashion house, which involve abortions and blackmail and cocaine. More murders follow as characters scramble and conspire to get the diary. One character’s tortured. Meanwhile the police are helpless. It all ends in death and betrayal.

The plot’s complex, but not as strange as the movie’s reputation led me to expect. While intricate, it’s perfectly comprehensible, and even possible for a watcher to work out ahead of time. The biggest surprise is the lack of exploration of character — there are a lot of faces at the fashion house, but few show a detailed personality behind them before they end up dead. In this way the narrative of the movie comes to feel a little dreamlike; it’s not confusing, but the way characters are introduced and then disposed of is unusual. At less than an hour and a half, it moves quickly enough that it’s difficult to anchor oneself in any one character — it’s hard to find a traditional lead character here until the film’s over and we realise the killer’s motives.

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I had two movies on my schedule for Wednesday, July 25. The first was The Witch: Part 1. The Subversion, a Korean action movie with super-hero elements. The second was a German-language Swiss movie called Blue My Mind, about a teenager moving to a new school and finding herself undergoing a strange metamorphosis. Both films were about young women, and both leads had elements of the inhuman to them. But these things were expressed in very different ways.

The Witch is written and directed by Park Hoon-jung. It begins with mysterious assassins killing gifted children, and one child escaping under cover of night. Ten years later, Ja-yoon (Kim Da-mi) lives in a small town with her adopted parents, hiding her telekinetic powers. But then she wins a nationally-televised talent competition, and the mysterious forces that threatened her when young find her again. Agents of various sorts draw closer to her and her family. Can her powers save her, and them?

This is a fast, intelligent, well-shot film with elements of thriller and super-hero story. It explodes into violence at the end after a build-up of increasing tension, and we neither miss the action earlier nor feel it unearned when it comes. Over two hours long (with a listed running time of 126 minutes), it passes by like a shot. The craftsmanship’s excellent and the pacing’s near-perfect, both in terms of the selection of scenes and also in the rhythm of the editing. Emotional moments come up and are allowed to breathe, but give way to more action-driven sequences in a way that feels natural.

Kim’s acting has to be mentioned here, as her Ja-yoon drives the film and keeps things interesting. She’s quick, funny, and interesting; when we find out what the actual story is behind her and her powers we get a new dimension of understanding to what we’ve already seen, but the point is that Kim’s able to give everyday scenes with Ja-yoon’s family and her best friend (Go Min-si) real interest. Park helps that by keeping a constant sense of tension, establishing mysterious villains and adroitly cutting to them to keep the audience on edge.

I will admit at this point that I’m talking around the story of the film, and that is because there’s a fair-play twist fairly late in the story that’s executed quite well and recontextualises much of what we thought we saw. It’s perfectly logical and, when it’s sprung on us, instantly makes perfect sense. I’d say it’s a good twist because it’s not simply a plot twist — character and theme are definitely involved, and all these aspects of the story benefit. I can say no more, except to observe that The Witch has a well-written and sharply-conceived script; and this twist feels of a piece.

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Late in the evening of Tuesday, July 24, I made my way to the J.A. De Sève Theatre for my one film of the day: Violence Voyager, an 83-minute animated feature by Japanese writer-director Ujicha. We follow an American schoolboy in Japan, Bobby (Aoi Yuki), as he and his friend explore some hills near his home. They find a strange, nearly-abandoned amusement park, but upon entering find themselves caught up in a terrible scheme. They and other children are captured, mutilated, mutated, and (in many cases) killed. Can Bobby free himself and others, and destroy the horrible place called Violence Voyager?

The first and overwhelming impression of the movie is of a dissonant strangeness. There’s a tone like a children’s story that seems destined to give way to something darker, and indeed it does, but then that darkness itself is hardly taken seriously. There’s a weird unconcern with traditional narrative effects at the same time that the structure’s remarkably tight. It’s not like much else I’ve seen, for better and worse.

Consider the animation style. It’s an unusual form called gekimation, which involves moving flat images. Lips don’t move, faces don’t shift. Shapes are moved about, and cuts give a further illusion of movement. This works better than one might think, especially once a few minutes have passed and the viewer’s assimilated the approach. Occasionally actual fluids or the like are used as visual elements as well, but mainly one watches painted pieces of paper slide over backgrounds. The art style’s intriguingly organic, with every brushstroke visible. I personally thought it was interesting without being attractive, but I can see how it could appeal more strongly to others.

As a story, there’s a sort of tension between horror and satire. It is genuinely transgressive, with all sorts of horror inflicted on children. There are genuinely surprising images here, as for example a rack of dead nude children (and the explicit nudity in some sequences is occasionally more surprising than the violence). And yet it feels muted, almost, by the thoroughgoing irony of the film. It avoids outright death-metal grotesquerie in place of its own kind of strangeness, and somehow never feels as confrontational as it seems to aim for. The early air of an optimistic children’s cartoon is never wholly abandoned, and rather than heighten the air of monstrosity, I find it functions as an alienation effect — it swathes the movie in a distancing irony, lessening the immediacy of everything we see.

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Yesterday I reviewed three of the movies I saw on Monday, July 23. Today I’ve written up my notes on the post-film question-and-answer sessions with the director of all three, Shinsuke Sato. All of what follows comes from my handwritten notes, and so may contain errors that crept in due to my hearing or transcription skills. Further, Sato spoke in Japanese, which was translated into either English or French depending on what language the questioner used, and while my French is competent enough that I caught most of the answers in the first two sessions, by the time the third session wrapped up it was near or past midnight.

First came zombie-apocalypse horror film I Am a Hero. Sato was asked how the movie was accepted by the producers and backers, and he said that it was rare to have this sort of film in the mainstream in Japan. Since roughly 2000, TV stations have been financing films, and they prefer material aimed at a more general audience. This film was backed by Toho, who wanted to make something that could not be made by a TV station. It was a good fit for Sato, as he’d made the two live-action Gantz films with Toho a dozen years before.

Asked if it was important to him to be respectful of the manga, he said the manga was unique; the film ran the risk of coming off as a simple zombie movie. Sato wanted to make a zombie film a little unlike any made before, while the manga creator put a certain amount of pressure on him by asking him simply to make a zombie film he would like. Asked about how he came up with the idea of zombies with a personality (carrying on with what they were obsessed with in life), Sato said that was in the manga, although he imagined a few of his own for the film. He said it was important for him to make Japanese zombies, creatures in some way distinct from American zombies. Zombies often come as hordes, individuals indistinct from each other, but he wanted to have each be individual.

He was asked about an early scene in the film, when Hideo has to confront his girlfriend, Tekko, who has been turned into a zombie; and specifically how he created her uncanny movement. Sato noted that Tekko was a high jumper in the original, and that he wanted to capture that energy. As the first zombie to appear in the film, she would have a high impact. He said he used three people to get her across, the actress, a stunt double, and a contortionist who is in the Guinness World Records. Asked about the lack of narrative payoff for the character of Hiromi, Sato said he’d cut a scene at the end that would have explained she was a hybrid who was the key to curing the virus. He decided it was more important to keep the focus on Hideo’s character arc rather than ruin the flow with explanations.

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I had three consecutive movies I wanted to watch on July 23. All three came from director Shinsuke Sato, all three were live-action manga adaptations, and all three were followed by question-and-answer sessions with Sato (the first at the De Sève Theatre, the second two at the larger Hall). I’ll write up what he had to say about his films in a separate post tomorrow. Today, my impressions of the movies themselves: the zombie apocalypse thriller I Am a Hero, the supernatural epic Bleach, and the science-fictional super-hero movie Inuyashiki. Note that I have read precisely none of the original works these movies were based on, and can speak only to the films I saw.

I Am a Hero (Ai Amu a Hiro, アイアムアヒーロー) was written by Akiko Nogi based on the manga by Kengo Hanazawa. Hideo (Yo Oizumi, Tokyo Ghoul) is a 35-year-old assistant to a manga creator, his aspirations and dreams dead or dying. Then the world suffers a zombie apocalypse from the spread of a deadly virus. Survivors flee to the top of Mount Fuji, because the virus can’t survive in the rarified air high up the mountain. Hideo scrambles to flee urban Tokyo, which is degenerating into mayhem; along the way he picks up a sidekick, a schoolgirl named Hiromi (Kasumi Arimura). Hiromi’s bitten by a zombie but instead of dying shows some strange powers and falls into a coma. The hapless Hideo — “the entire world changed, but I didn’t,” he groans — brings her along as he finds a community of survivors holed up in a mini-mall, and struggles to survive the tensions and suspicions he causes within the group.

The movie’s entertaining but oddly structured. The scenes early on, as Tokyo falls prey to the zombies, are fast and filled with explosions, with an epic scale that drops away for the rest of the film. Hideo’s discovery of the survivors in the mall in particular feels like a real slackening of the tension. And the climax of the film isn’t especially satisfying — it’s a big fight, but not a particularly imaginative one, and the challenges aren’t met by any new development in character or theme. It feels like more of the same rather than a rising to a satisfying end.

Moreover, on a basic plot level, more’s left unexplained and undeveloped than I’d like. Specifically, Hiromi’s powers, established early on, don’t return. She herself never wakes up from her coma. Apparently there was a scene shot for the end of the film which would have established that she held the key to a cure of the virus, but that exchange was dropped for the sake of the flow of the ending; I can understand the thinking, but that information needed to be put into the film somewhere, I think. As it is, Hiromi seems to exist mainly to show that Hideo has some spark of heroism latent within him, as he tries to save her from the madness of the world. That’s fine to a point, but effectively turns her into a plot coupon with no agency of her own.

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