Doomtomylo
a film so unique, intoxicating and bizarre that it not only demands another viewing, but is also forgivable as a satirical comedy where the jokes eventually take the back seat.
Jemima
It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.
Walter Sloane
Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.
kluseba
This movie is a pleasant offering for any fan of Japanese cinema and weird mystery movies. I just gave this movie a try because I was attracted by the strange cover of a naked woman and a press text on the back that compared this movie to the works of Cronenberg and especially Lynch which I admire.This movie is not as strange and difficult to follow as the works of a David Lynch, but it comes quite close and proves its uniqueness with a weird fantasy story and many original ideas that make you doubt what is reality or illusion in this movie as the frontier between both is a very small path. The movie lives by its strange and mysterious main character, by its dark and frightening scenes in the metro or in the strange apartment and by its idea that the main character films everything he sees. The dark footage, the minimalist dialogues and the atmospheric and frightening music create an intense and uneasy atmosphere like in a morbid horror movie plus the Lynchian weirdness and Japanese originality as well as a shot of intellectual or philosophical content. That's a highly explosive mixture even though it is a typical slow paced flick like many in this genre. I really suggest you to watch this flick if my description already made you curious.This is a dark tale of an isolated and frosty man that wants to discover such an intense emotion as deadly gripping fear after he has accidentally filmed the suicide of an unemployed in a metro station. The main character wants to live the same emotion, stops to take his pills against depression and goes out to look what could have frightened the suicidal man in the metro as he is convinced that the man has seen something frightening out there. In the depths of the metro, the main character discover a strange underworld where strange spider men or robots live as well as some beggars and the ghost of the suicidal guy. He later discovers a strange and abandoned city in between some mountains of madness where he meets a naked and pale girl that is imprisoned in a small cave by a chain. The main character liberated the girl and takes her home. But she is very strange as she doesn't speak a single work and refuses to eat or drink anything that her new friend wants to offer her. As the main actor then gets strange and menacing calls and is observed and followed by a hysterical lady that says that the strange girl was her daughter, the camera man realizes that a strange secret surrounds this wicked girl: she needs blood to live and forces her saviour to look for new carcasses if he doesn't want to fail his strange mission and get menaced by the strange calls.
chaos-rampant
This sounded very interesting to me in an abstract/visual experiment kind of way when I read about it. Man takes a movie camera to the subway of Tokyo in search of unspeakable horrors and comes up with some to take back to his apartment. I love movies that take a peripatetic approach, that take us on walkabouts through weird/elaborate architecture, from The Shining to Last Year at Marienbad, and I hoped this would be one of the greats.I like these films to be shot in DV, lights are harsh and cold and space attains an immediacy that appeals to me. If I was disappointed in this then it's not because it meanders and is short on plot but rather because the lovely visual experiment is used by Shimizu to tell a story of almost EC Comics simplicity, madness and damnation. The protagonist sees news footage of a man stabbing his eye in the Tokyo subway. The epiphany to go looking in the subway for that ultimate terror gleaming in the victim's eyes moments before his death comes seemingly after a quick mashup of superimposed images of video screens, white noise, and reaction shots of the character looking dazed - a visual slapdash chaos that seems like the director's way of saying "something clicked in his mind" and nothing more.I like that Shimizu simply took a camera to the streets of Tokyo to make Marebito, we really don't see enough films of that kind by people who know how to make them, and I wish he would've used Hollow Earth as a springboard of ideas instead of making direct allusions to it. I was fascinated by the subject in my teens, as with other mystical theories I'm still shocked that there are people who take it at face value, as something more than interesting myth (Shimizu fortunately is not one of them), yet the discussion in the subway tunnel where a bunch of arcane references to the subject are bandied up serves nothing. I'm still glad that I saw it though, made me want to see some more Shinya Tsukamoto.In the end, Marebito is about a man's struggle with his own madness, but it's a bit slapdash about telling us about it.
lastliberal
A strange film by Grudge writer/director Takashi Shimizu.Shinya Tsukamoto (Ichi the Killer) is consumed with finding out the source of terror that caused a man to stab himself in the eye. He wants to experience the same terror - terror so horrible that it would cause you to want to kill yourself.He goes underground looking for the beings that inhabit the tunnels under Tokyo and finds a naked girl, who he brings home to live with him. The girls is more animal than human and he kills to provide her blood rather than give her his own blood, which she wants.It is not certain throughout whether he is going mad or finding what he is searching for. He even tries to escape, but resumes the search until he finally succumbs to the terror.Despite the shaky camera work, which some like, but which distracts me, it was a fascinating look at terror and certainly a film that contains much more than available at first glance. A blend of mysticism and horror, it is a worthy view for fans of Japanese horror.
christopher-underwood
This is some movie. At first deceptively simple and later maybe deceptively involved. Such was the confident manner of the director, Takashi Shimizu, I just went along despite everything and whilst it is difficult to associate with the lead character, the mighty, actor/director (Tetsuo) Shinya Tsuramoto, eventually persuades. Not an easy film to watch with its flashing and even blank screen moments, not to mention the horrific violence, but once this has you hooked, it is difficult to escape. Everything is unbelievable and yet there is a niggling doubt that just maybe things are this bad. Tsuramoto gives a towering performance as a completely lost soul searching it seems for almost anything to justify his existence. What he finds is not a pretty sight but this movie remains with you, for good or bad, long after viewing. Bold and original film making.
