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Synopsis: Sato, a sound engineer, has a wife, Junka, who is a medium. She can feel the presence of other worlds when she touches objects. Sometimes she sees apparitions unbidden. Here abilities are in demand first from a psychologist studying paranormal phenomenon, then by the police, who are attempting to locate a little girl who was kidnapped by a man they have captured. By coincidence, the little girl is closer to Junka than she knows. While Sato records sounds near Mt. Fuji, the girl climbs into Sato's equipment box after escaping from her captor. By the time Sato and his wife discover the girl, she is a goner. This presents them with a moral choice: go to the police? Hide the body? And what about the ghost of the girl, who remains nearby as a kind of accusation...

The Function of Horror: For all the stock elements of the Asian ghost movie--and Seance uses elements familiar to anyone who has seen a couple of Asian ghost movies--the real strength of the sub-genre is the tendency of the makers of these movies to overreach the genre, to use the elements of the genre for purposes beyond offering the audience a few jump scares along the way. These movies aren't about horror, per se, so much as the horror either arrises from the situations, or the horror is symbolic of some other thematic concern. A lot of critics will suggest that a film that successfully uses the tropes of the horror movie as a means of philosophical, moral, or spiritual inquiry has "transcended" the genre. I don't think much of those critics. I think films that succeed in turning this particular trick aren't "transcending" genre so much as they are executing genre constructs in the way those constructs should be used. Of course, a lot of horror fans hate this sort of thing, and they have no patience for a film that doesn't feed a hunger for gore and cheap scares. To each his or her own, I guess. For myself, I prefer films that over-reach themselves. I want a film that says something about the human condition. These are the kinds of films that stick with you as an adult, long after the adrenaline rush provided by red-meat horror films has abated.

Which brings me in a roundabout way to Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Kurosawa is the most cerebral of the architects of the new Asian horror movies. His movies are the antithesis of the blood and guts horror movie. They are subtle. They almost completely eschew the "jump scare." They prefer an escalation of mortal dreads. And they have moral and philosophical heft to them. Kurosawa's horror films are the creepiest films of the movement. They'll get under your skin, if you let them, and they'll haunt you for days and weeks after you see them.

Deja Vu: Seance is a remake of Bryan Forbes's Seance on a Wet Afternoon, itself based on a novel by Mark McShane. Unlike that film, though, Seance is explicitly supernatural. Also unlike that film, the moral dilemma of the central couple is a good deal crueler and less premeditated. In changing the nature of the crime committed by our central couple, Kurosawa sets up a moral vortex with a vicious downdraft. This is an example of the horror movie as film noir, though Kurosawa's approach is more naturalistic than what one would find in film noir (or most horror movies, for that matter). He understands that to make this work, he has to show us these characters before the event to understand the chaos their lives become afterwards. This has the surprising effect of taking characters that are VERY sympathetic at the outset and gradually making them unlikable. I can't remember another film that charts a similar character arc.

The Devil in the Details: The first time I saw this film, I missed the first on-screen ghost. It's that kind of film. If you blink you miss things. If you have ambient noise in the space while you watch it, you'll miss things. Apropos of a film whose male lead is a sound engineer, the sounds on the soundtrack weave a powerful spell. This is a film where half-glimpsed details are signifiers, where half-heard noises are warnings of a sort. Kurosawa's style of filming doesn't necessarily isolate these instances for the audience, either. He goes out of his way NOT to lead the audience around by the nose. One side effect of this technique is that empty spaces and dead air become creepy in and of themselves as an audience begins to look in such places for revealing details, or, worse, begins to anticipate bad things filling those spaces. Like Kenji Mizoguchi before him, Kurosawa is a master of architectural shot composition,

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Seance is the way it seems to map out Kurosawa's immediate future as a filmmaker. Bright Future, Pulse, and Doppelganger all seem to have their roots in this film. It's not often that a fairly major director offers up a keystone work as a throwaway project on television, but here it is...

 
11/2/2005 

That isn't to say that I'm opposed to the red-meat approach to horror. I'm not. But I don't need fountains of fake blood to satisfy my horror movie jones....back