Fantasia 2021, Part V: Uzumaki
Most of the films at Fantasia 2021 were new, but some were time-honoured works given a screening either because of a new restoration or because they played the festival in the past and were brought back to celebrate Fantasia’s 25th anniversary. Uzumaki (うずまき, literally “Spiral”), from the year 2000, is a case of both — it has a new 4K restoration, and it played Fantasia in 2000. The film’s an adaptation of the manga by Junji Ito, though since it was made while the manga was still ongoing it’s an adaptation that had to find its own answers for some of the questions the text hadn’t resolved at the time of production. Directed by Higuchinsky, AKA Akihiro Higuchi, with a screenplay by Takao Niita, the movie came two years after Ringu (the original version of The Ring) and the same year as the first straight-to-video Ju-On film. It’s one of the early examples of J-horror, then, but sub-genre aside it’s something interesting to consider in its own right.
The story follows Kirie Goshima (Eriko Hatsune, who would go on to have a role in the live-action Gatchaman), who, like her boyfriend Shuichi Saito (Fhi Fan), is a teen in the small town of Kurouzu-cho. As the movie opens, strange things are happening therein. There’s a mysterious death at the high school. One of Kirie’s classmates has a crush on her and demonstrates this by appearing to her at unexpected times. And Shuichi’s father is growing obsessed with spirals. That last becomes more significant as the film goes on and spirals become increasingly visible through the town — and Mr. Saito’s madness grows worse. And people die. Kirie and Shuichi investigate, desperate to save themselves and the adults close to them and the whole town.
The second feature film I planned to see at Fantasia 2021 came bundled with an eight-minute short by a familiar name. That short was “Let’s Fall In Love,” written and directed by Shengwei Zhou, whose odd stop-motion feature S He 
Among the pleasures of the Fantasia Film Festival are the showcases of short films. Some of these feature-length collections get a new iteration every year, while some come and go depending on what’s submitted to the festival. Fantasia’s programmers have a great sense of how to group shorts together, meaning not only are the annual showcases reliably strong work, but new themes are bound to present work of major interest as well. So one of the things that intrigued me the most when I first saw Fantasia’s 2021 schedule was Radical Spirits, a collection of six short films about (broadly speaking) traditional ways of being and traditional spiritual paths. I decided to make it my second viewing of the festival.
