Simply one of best 4 or 5 horror flicks ever...

Rating: 10/10 (11 November 2005)

As an amateur film reviewer, I'm genuinely surprised by the number of individuals who rated this movie at an "8" or lower. Based on the very weird, surrealistic Japanese original, this film breaks the mold of the increasingly predictable, mega-redundant themes and settings of the horror genre in the US. Please... Visiting a good DVD rental shop with tons of horror flicks lined up together is truly depressing, so commonplace are nearly all productions from US companies.
If one eliminates sci-fi "horror" films like the great "Alien" of 1979, then this film joins a very small select group, like "Night of the Living Dead," the remakes of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" and Carpenter's "The Thing," and then moves decisively beyond them into some yet-to-be-defined new departure of eclectic imagination. Sure, a few of the scenes really stretch all credibility (as the contrived survival of a key player in one of several sequential "endings"), but the movement, complexity, and cast of characters in the work render this objection mostly innocuous. Strange, inexplicable occurrences simply remain flatly mysterious or ambiguous. The fly (not a spoiler). Yet the "shocking" scene in the scary, revelatory Edward-Munch-like house also shares in the tradition of somewhat conventional "build-up" scenes right out of "The Thing." Finally, unlike the wonderful "gotcha" resolution of "The Sixth Sense," this film concludes with an ominously open-ended question, actually giving the culminating terror a palpable, horrifying moral dilemma that requires no sequel whatever. This is utterly unique. And it simply isn't what American audiences pay good "horror" money to see, on screen or video.
If this isn't a 10, folks, then I'd like to know one that's been made in the past ten years.