The 2005 film, Reincarnation, is a minor J Horror masterwork by director Takashi Shimizu (Ju-On, The Grudge). The cinematography can, at times, range from straightforward modern Japanese gloss to more old-school Insomnia (The Norwegian one, not the American) or Identification of a Woman (Michelangelo Antonioni) levels of obfuscation, fog, and dreamlike-revelric sepia. This cinematographic brilliance is paired with an impressive score by Kenji Kawai of Ghost in the Shell (The original masterpiece, not the American failure) and overall Mamoru Oshii collaboration fame. His themes range from theremin-influenced voicings, to Bernard Hermann Hitchcockian traditional scorings, and even a synthesizer ode to Vangelis’ Blade Runner soundtrack!

In other words, I really like this film!

The epilogue introduces our ghosts who take one victim after another in quick succession that builds to a crescendo before breaking into the main plot. During this epilogue, a young girl sees the face of an old man in her malfunctioning cell phone, this is her reflection. Another portly, distinctly Hitchcock-like man, in appearance, enters an elevator unknowingly populated by a ghost who drives him mad. A man enters a public restroom and sees his face distorted into a grotesque, grey zombie-like hue before his very eyes. He shrugs off the experience and drives home in the night. He hits a man on the road, gets out and sees the man unscathed and staring out from beneath his vehicle, the voice of the forest erupts in loud wailing winds, and the faces of zombified ghosts erupt from out of the shadows, ala Carnival of Souls Herk Harvey, to take him back with him to wherever they have emerged.

The main arc is a film within a film narrative. A young director, Matsumura, is making a film about a murder that occurred more than 30 years prior. One of the actresses who is auditioning claims that she is perfect for a role in the film as she is the reincarnation of a young woman who was murdered, and she claims she remembers parts of the experience. Wrongly passed over as an eccentric, as we will see later, a different young woman (Nagisa Sugiura) is chosen from among the bunch. She does not speak during the audition, but somehow her glance interests the director. Beyond the aesthetics and mise-en-scene, and the powerful driving epilogue, this third element of meta-film in the film was the straw on the camel’s back that floored me and drew me in. The postmodern techniques of irony and self-reflexivity are apparent throughout, but do not make themselves too overt as to break the viewer’s sustained gaze.

As Nagisa reads the script, blocks out the scenes, rehearses her lines and action, visits the premises of the hotel in which the events on which the script are based, and eventually makes the film, she is constantly shifting between reality, daydream, paranoid obsession, dream, flights of fancy, and temporal shifts back and forward again and again through time and location. These scenes are often invested with a powerful, low-key and subtly lower-contrast, grainier cinematography that spirit away the viewer and the viewing experience alongside Nagisa. In one poignant scene, she enters a restroom in the Ono Kanko Hotel where the murders took place, but when she leaves she crosses a liminal gateway into the world of the past. Her film companions, the actors and producers, are nowhere to be found, but she relives the experiences of her past life and witnesses some of the events of that day so long ago. We see her brother drop a red bouncy ball and as it turns a corner in the hallway, it breaks into the real world and is found by Matsumura, the director of the film, in real-time. Nagisa shies away from the murderer on one side of a two-way closet and exits the other door to find Matsumura, and not the murderer, there instead.

These details are just a few among the many that make this film a standout in the J Horror canon. It is artful and beautiful unlike many of its contemporaries in Japan and most of its American counterparts in the genre. It is constantly shifting in ways that engage audience involvement on a gut level, but on a cerebral one as well. And it is one amongst those rare breed of films that leave you with something after your viewing is over.

Cody Ward

[For Part 2 of this October Horror essay series click HERE]