Kwaidan (1964)

A revisit of Masaki Kobayashi's masterpiece of atmospheric horror, "Kwaidan" (1964), an epic collection of four spine-chilling tales of the supernatural, effortlessly enthralled yet again, with its majestic flourish, this time in a brand new, fully restored, uncut Criterion transfer, the spectacular cinematography with its gorgeous colours enhanced, like you've never seen. 

All four stories now appear in their full, unabridged detail, previously unavailable even in the earlier Criterion edition. Of course, the cuts were in no way hampering the meaning or the flow of the stories, but what is the point if a film is not enjoyed in its complete form, in its original, intended glory?

What we get with the new release, is the complete 183 minutes version with a mesmerizing image transfer that will make your jaw drop. The richness of the beautiful colours is significantly highlighted in this stunning new transfer. The film's biggest asset is its chilling, slow-burning, otherworldly atmosphere, the likes of which are rarely matched, and this new edition with its sharper, fuller look, accentuates it like never before. 

Kobayashi takes us right into the realm of the spirits with a dense, enchanting environment replete with a bravura sound design and a dissonant score by the great Tôru Takemitsu, creating an unsettling, hypnotic atmosphere. The set design is magnificent; words are simply insufficient to describe how great the achieved look really is!

The supernatural realm comes frighteningly alive with Kobayashi's extraordinary vision. There are effects of the kind that would shame any modern horror. Forget all the mindless gore, fake CGI and those annoying, cliched jump scares of today; this is true horror that makes your hair stand on end, simply by placing you in spirit (pun not intended) in the ghostly otherworld created by the talent on board.

In order to enjoy a film like "Kwaidan", you really have to immerse yourself in the universe created by Kobayashi. Of course, he does more than half the job quite effortlessly, for once you witness those magnetic frames, you can't help but experience the mystical pull and be swept away, far within! With a strong command on storytelling already established with his prior masterworks like "Harakiri" (1962) and "The Human Condition" (1959-1961) films, the viewer cannot help but submit to Kobayashi's narrative prowess and watch the haunting poetry in motion unfold.

All of the tales are brilliant of course, but the one that stands tall is still "Hoichi the Earless" an old folk tale, often recreated in Japanese theatre as well. Akira Kurosawa regular, Takashi Shimura stars in this segment in an important role. There's a distinct tragic air to this ancient lore; a dirge-like quality that has to be seen and felt to be believed. The assembly of ghosts in a manor listening to the recital of a tragic tale of a lost battle is one of the greatest sequences ever seen in cinema, accomplishing the unique feat of being hair-raising and sorrowful at the same time!

"The Black Hair" tells the story of a wronged woman, whose husband, a samurai abandons her owing to poverty and returns many years later, full of regret, only to make a horrible discovery. The design of desolate ruins, and especially the makeup effects in this segment are nothing short of brilliant. It is unbelievable how authentic they are for the time the film was made.

"The Woman in the Snow", starring one of Japan's most famous stars, Tatsuya Nakadai, tells the tale of a ghostly woman who asks for a solemn oath from a young woodcutter in exchange for sparing his life. The woodcutter manages to keep the oath, except much later in his life. The consequences of breaking a promise are revealed in a terrifying twist. The use of colours in this segment is exemplary. Various vivid shades of blue and red are used to a striking effect. Special mention must be made of the colouring of the sky; the way it changes across times, and that nightmarish design of a giant eye looking down upon the earth is goose-bumpy as hell!

The final tale, "In a Cup of Tea" is the shortest and the most surrealistic of them all. It all begins when a middle-aged samurai begins to see the reflection of an unknown younger man in his cup of tea. The man in the reflection eventually shows up, causing havoc with the samurai's mental state.

This story ends with a fantastic meta twist, while maintaining in an initial disclaimer that it was an old folklore passed down across generations, but one that did not have a concrete ending! A clever little conclusion is provided here in the form of an epilogue of sorts, of course, and it is the kind of finale that will make you cheer in sheer admiration. 

"Kwaidan" is an essential classic of Japanese cinema. If you wish to witness a filmmaking marvel, grab it now!

Score: 10/10

Gozu (2003)

Celebrated, controversial and cult Japanese filmmaker Takashi Miike abandons the gore that he is famous for, in favour of more atmosphere this time around. He does retain the gross-out quotient however, by including some of the sickest visuals ever, that may have you cringing in disgust!

"The Great Yakuza Horror theatre: Gozu" as the title credits go, begins on an alarming note with a bunch of gangsters, the Japanese mob (Yakuza) meeting up at a local cafe. One of them, by the name of Ozaki (Shô Aikawa) interrupts the proceedings to express his concern about a strange but harmless looking dog outside, that he claims is a yakuza dog, trained to kill the yakuza! In a shocking display of animal cruelty Ozaki takes charge and tortures the dog to death, as a terrified audience watches him, transfixed. It appears that Ozaki has gone completely bonkers and the mob boss is concerned, owing to which he is sent on a long drive along with a faithful member of the group, Minami (Yûta Sone, credited as Hideki Sone) to a disposal site apparently to get rid of him. Ozaki displays more fits of madness on the way and soon, Minami reaches a dead end.

Up until this point, the film looks like a gleefully absurdist dark comedy revolving around gangsters, replete with their off-kilter behavior and intentionally absurd situations. But very soon, Ozaki disappears when Minami stops for a coffee break. It is from this juncture onwards that "Gozu" enters the bizarro territory and starts to resemble a Freudian fever nightmare full of occurrences that can only happen in hallucinations and psychotic dreams. This is of course, a very good thing, and exactly the kind of stuff that gets this reviewer on a cinematic high, except, only when it's spectacularly imaginative and handled with the kind of finesse that is necessary in such cases.

Miike commands our attention for a good part of the film that now takes the shape of a surreal horror comedy with moments that are genuinely freaky and scary and some that are wickedly hilarious. He introduces one looney character after another involved in one crazy scenario after another. There is a man with a skin pigmentation problem, who wants to share a room with Minami. There is a ghostly inn run by a pair of old siblings. 

The old woman who is the owner of the inn oozes milk from her breasts, offers it to her customers and also bottles it and stores it as breakfast material! Her brother is a supposed psychic who can talk to evil spirits, but before that, has to be caned by his sister to conjure up the ghosts. There are two patrons in a coffee shop that seem to be sitting at their table forever, and never go away, always discussing the weather conditions, even 'til the next day. The coffee shop owners are all cross-dressers!

If that is not enough to make you want to reach out for the damn movie already, then there is an awesomely bizarre and chilling encounter with a minotaur-like creature with the head of a cow and the body of a man, salivating at the mouth and holding out its giant tongue! A man suddenly exists as a woman. And then there is a birth scene like you have never ever witnessed before!

Oh yes, Miike's film penned by Sakichi Satô has a good share of twisted ideas that could give any lover of surrealism and bizarre psychological horror a major high and immense gratification. There is most of what you would expect from a film that encompasses such material. There is a real fine minimalist, but creepy atmosphere that directly reflects the low budget that the film was made on. The film is shot through a greenish-yellow filter that complements the atmosphere. The sound design is excellent, especially in certain scenes that are capable of disturbing your composure and scare you witless. Some jaw-dropping imagery raises its head high once in a while and successfully makes us chuckle nervously at the sheer warped imagination!

Alas, for a length of almost 130 minutes, sequences of such magnitude are few and far between. More so, when Minami's search for Ozaki begins to look like a wild goose chase, the proceedings start to get repetitive and a tad boring. It doesn't help that the film already suffers from an uneven pace. Not that the creativity isn't there. There is just less of it to justify a length of this sort. And what has been used to fill the gaps seems half-baked and underdone. When Miike does go over the top, it is with the increasingly shocking sexual imagery and some elements which are downright distasteful and tend to overstay their welcome. Surely, toilet humour need not have been part of something that is trying to be distressing. 

A freewheeling narrative such as this usually has immense potential, for in a film like "Gozu" that does not have to adhere to rationale and logic, one can really go all out with their imagination. One could see such outlandishness of a diverse nature in Seijun Suzuki's Taisho Roman Trilogy, especially. Those films were also psychological/supernatural thrillers and ghost stories and were far more imaginative with their content. Only "Gozu" isn't as wondrous and well-executed as either Suzuki's films or even some of David Lynch's masterpieces that it is often compared to. The ideas are there, but they feel somewhat lacking. It is evident that the screenwriter-director duo have definitely tried very hard. One just wishes there was more meat in the writing, more misadventures, creative ones at that, and not mere adherence to shock-value sexuality and accompanying absurd humour, especially like what is shown towards the end. 

It is not difficult to form a broad level interpretation of the events, given the visual symbols and the fact that the protagonist is a virgin who has just had a phimosis operation . It could be interpreted as another coming-of-age fantasy that takes the shape of a nightmare, reminding one of Jaromil Jires' "Valerie and her week of Wonders" (1970). 

"Gozu" could have been a lot better, given its universe and the material at hand. Only it needed extra spicing up with some more inventive weirdness rather than the dependency on bizarre sexuality and pointless repetition of ideas. Miike dabbles in an area that is not his, and does deliver to an extent, but falls short of the benchmark set by some other filmmakers.

Score: 7/10

Borgman (2013)

This disturbing little Dutch sleeper creeps up quite surreptitiously and affects your mind to numbing effects much like the eponymous lead character of this flabbergasting film does to his hapless victims.

In a rather strange and almost surreal opening sequence we see a bearded vagrant by the name of Camiel Borgman (Jan Bijvoet) being hunted and chased out of his underground lair by two men, a dog and a priest with a shotgun! There are a couple more drifters as we find out. 

Obviously there is an answer to why the priest is hunting Camiel down, but director Alex Van Warmerdam is a sly genius who will never give you straight answers to this shocking beginning. He will only start unleashing his series of clues, as the main plot unfolds when Camiel escapes from the dense woods into a nice bourgeois locality, like a beast thrown out from his comfort zone, and into the urban lands. 

Much like any home invasion film, a la Michael Haneke's sadistic "Funny Games" (1997), this rather smooth-talking wanderer gains entry into the home of the beautiful Marina (Hadewych Minis) and her TV producer husband Richard (Jeroen Perceval). Marina seems to empathize with Borgman from the word go and offers him a chance to bathe, gives him food and shelter for a while after her husband showers violent blows on him, but only to protect her honour, no less! 

Little does anyone know, though, that this one gesture of kindliness is only the first nail in the coffin for this nice looking upper class family with three beautiful children, and that their guest has no intentions of leaving. He has a sinister masterplan up his sleeve to weave a deadly web and irreversibly impact their lives psychologically. By this point, some readers may think this is Alex Van Warmerdam's rendition of "Teorema", that excellent 1968 Pier Paolo Pasolini film. But well, prepare to be surprised, and find out that this is not a rip off by a long shot, as the story takes unpredictable turns and in fact has you on the edge about not only what would happen next, but also have you screaming out loud "What on earth is really happening?" 

"Borgman" (2013) is as original as they come and it is here to cement its status as a new cult thriller that subtly fuses the classic aesthetic of European art-house minimalism with more extreme genres like psychological dramas and supernatural elements. Yet what is served in the end is an allegorical mind-bender that has its roots in Christian mythology!

There are chances that initially the viewer may be taken quite aback regarding the happenings on screen. The first half an hour may simply seem indigestible to some much like earlier home invasion films. But then the plot thickens and nothing seems as ordinary as on the surface. There are dreams and nightmares that seem all too real.

There appears to be some kind of psychological manipulation leading to mood swings and hostility. And before we know it, an 'X' marks a spot almost miraculously! No spoilers, but there are indeed forces other than the real and tangible ones at work here, when the mysterious, mangy stray dogs appear, much to our amazement. There also appears to be some sort of chemical treatment at work.

If all of this sounds utterly vague, then it is just as well. That is a bit part of what you are in for, as normal events take turns that lead to almost unreal events. It makes little sense as to Borgman's motivations and his sense of purpose. But underneath this complex exterior is yet another attack on the upper class ego and an arrogance that is born out of the affluent lifestyle. Pride cometh before a fall they say, and this proverb would fit very well within the context of the film. But the distinction between good and evil is blurred here, given the aforementioned mythological angle.

So those well versed with the religious texts can immediately read into the names and connect with the more larger themes, bolstered by the biblical quote in the beginning "And they descended upon the earth to strengthen their ranks". So could "Borgman" be an allegory of Camael, one of the seven archangels who supposedly led the forces that expelled Adam and Eve from the garden of Eden (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camael)? The point in question not entirely farfetched, for Camiel is later appointed as a gardener with the family in their plush abode (a symbolic garden of Eden)! Coincidence? Perhaps, depending on how you look at it.

And therein lies one of the key aspects that make "Borgman" a marvelous cinematic puzzle-box and a true winner; the inherent ambiguity of it all. The viewer only gets to see bits and pieces of what actually happens. There are no clear answers. But clues are thrown about in a manner that would give way to multiple interpretations. It is up to the viewers to discern in a way that fits their sense of reasoning.

For an ambitious film that boasts of such an intriguing and complex plot, Warmerdam exercises tremendous restraint and refrains from making a big hullabaloo about anything at all. It ends as calmly as it starts but the audiences are left with anything but a sense of calm, for they are subjected to something so downright challenging, it is difficult to not have your brain cells rapidly stimulated in trying to work out what just happened to you through this cinematic offering.

"Borgman" is a masterpiece; a brilliantly acted, bone-chilling, haunting piece of cinema that is bold, disturbing and ultimately rewarding yet has been criminally overlooked in the recent lot of European cinema. It really needs to come out in the open. Do yourself a favour and watch this film! Now!


Score: 10/10

Yumeji (1991)

Cult Japanese filmmaker, Seijun Suzuki collaborated with producer Genjiro Arato once again, to come up with a third film almost 10 years after 1981's "Kagero-Za". This three-film set is what later came to be known as the Taisho Roman Trilogy of films, all being surrealist psychological dramas with elements of the supernatural, set in the Taisho period.

"Yumeji" (1991) takes the philosophy of the first two films to a new level by building its unreal story around a character from real life. This is a semi-fictional (more fiction, than fact, quite obviously!) account of real life Japanese artist/painter and poet, Takesiha Yumeji. Thus "Yumeji" becomes a unique hybrid; a surrealist psychological thriller cum biopic!

Regardless of whether there are similarities with the actual life of the artist Yumeji or not, screenwriter Yozo Tanaka has spun a rather interesting yarn revolving around the eponymous central character. After a soulful title track in the credits that sets a melancholic as well as a sad-ghost-story mood, "Yumeji" begins on a shockingly off-kilter note with a sequence of images and scenes that are disorienting enough to make you feel ill at ease. It is almost like an overdone nightmare sequence, with Yumeji (portrayed by Japanese glam rock artist Kenji Sawada) who at first seems to be chasing a woman in red, perched upon a tree, and then ends up in a chair with a long pistol, while a faceless man with a top hat rambles some words about seeing the woman’s face, and asks Yumeji to shoot him!

The first ten odd minutes are filled with such visual as well as verbal randomness. Conversations between characters don't make much sense and scenes and backdrops change at the drop of a hat. There are talks of Yumeji eloping with his lady love, his artworks appear on a pillar of a train station as he touches it (!),  and eventually, instead of eloping, he ends up having sex with another woman in a ramshackle dwelling. The woman herself is an animated, clown-like woman while Yumeji is an eccentric, flamboyant, moody playboy who breaks into a song or a poem and sometimes, suddenly gets hysterical or acts like a buffoon! After the jarring beginning, the plot starts to take shape in an isolated location in Kanagawa, where Yumeji encounters different women, and comes face to face with a murderer being hunted by the police and various ghosts and apparitions, including the spirit of the person whose widow he seduces!

In the tradition of the first two films of the trilogy, in "Yumeji", the lines between dream and reality are blurred. What is real and what is imagined (either within or outside of a dream), is left to the viewer to interpret. Suzuki unleashes his trademark idiosyncrasies of filming style and editing, and invites you to have a ball with the madness on the screen…if you are ready for it! With beautiful cinematography by Junichi Fujisawa (although it doesn't match up to the radiating brilliance of the first two films, which were cinematographed by Kazue Nagatsuka), we are subjected to a colorful canvas of a dream universe on celluloid with a bizarre story at its center that lends some food for thought despite its incoherent nature. 

As the story proceeds, it is not just the backdrops and scenes that shift, it is also the mood and tempo of the narrative! While at times, "Yumeji" appears to be an enigmatic horror story with some creepy images and a haunting background score to go along, halfway through, it changes tone and turns into a slapstick comedy with a mad bunch of characters resorting to absurd lunacy. The bunch also includes the murderer on a horse, carrying a scythe in a great slow motion sequence with nary a sound apart from the galloping of the horse, that does not sync with the slow speed of the scene! This scene is a testament of how Suzuki wants to just let his imagination run wild with his scene composition and not adhere to convention in the least!

After an intriguing first third, it is the sequences in the second third of the film that seem to ramble on aimlessly and border on the tedium. But before one could write off the film as yet another exercise in a boisterous display of self-indulgence and pretense, Suzuki brings things back on track in the last third with an interesting twist and a new direction to interpret the story thus far! It is at this juncture that several questions could make way into an enthusiastic viewer's mind. A sudden change of events and the inclusion of some key scenes make us question Yumeji's psyche and his art inspirations. Did his art manifest in his dreams/hallucinations, or did they in fact give him inspiration to produce new art? As he struggles with his own personality and its variations, and also the insecurities stemming from the presence of his peers/competitors, Yumeji makes a rapid descent into insanity…or does he?

To expect any concrete answer out of "Yumeji" is absurd (no pun intended!). The idea is to give in to Suzuki's wild imagination and enjoy it in its hallucinatory glory. There is some sublime music to go along too. Watch out for the clever little scene with a glass replication of what seems to be falling rain drops, with a forlorn looking Tomoyo (Tomoyo Mariya) in a bridal gown, against Shigeru Umebayashi's haunting music piece "Yumeji's theme" that was later used as the central theme in Wong Kar-Wai's "In the Mood for Love" (2000).

"Yumeji" doesn't break new grounds stylistically, nor does it surpass the first film of the set "Zigeunerweisen" (1980), which still remains the best of the three, but it certainly provides for a solid film experience.

Score: 8/10