Marebito

Plot synopsis:
Masuoka (Shinya Tsukamoto) carries a camera everywhere he goes. He becomes obsessed with the idea of fear when he sees a frightened man shove a knife in his eye to commit suicide. Wishing to understand the fear that the man must have felt before his death, Masuoka descends into a labyrinthine underground area beneath the city, where he sees human-like creatures that walk on their hands and knees and whimper like dogs. While searching the series of tunnels and passages, Masuoka encounters a homeless inhabitant who warns him about the Deros. He then meets the ghost of Kuroki, the man who killed himself, and learns more about the underworld. After hours of searching, Masuoka discovers a mountain range with a village built by the underground dwellers. He finds a naked girl (Tomomi Miyashita) chained to a wall. He takes her back to his apartment and notices she doesn't eat, drink, or speak.
The girl, whom Masuoka dubs 'F', appears to be something other than human, and Masuoka becomes obsessed with understanding her. He sets up cameras that enable him to observe her from his cell phone when he leaves the apartment, and checks on her regularly. On a trip to the shopping mall, he sees F speaking to someone off camera, and a menacing man in black appears behind him. When he returns to the apartment, a woman in a yellow jacket is hiding in the stairway outside his door. Inside, he finds F convulsing, and unsuccessfully attempts to feed her. He discovers that twelve seconds of camera footage is missing, and receives a mysterious phone call from a pay phone call warning him that he is in serious trouble.
After being beaten with his camera by a stranger whom he filmed, Masuoka cuts his finger on the broken lens and returns home. He discovers that F survives on blood when she licks his finger, and cuts himself to feed her further. Masuoka begins to care for her by providing animal carcasses, deciding to treat F more as a pet than a human. The woman in yellow confronts him in the street, saying the girl is his daughter Fuyumi and asking where she is. Masuoka denies having a daughter and runs away, returning to the apartment to find it has been broken into and F missing. He wanders the streets searching for F and encounters the man in black, who expresses his disappointment in Masuoka's handling of her, speaking to him telepathically in the same voice as in the phone call. When Masuoka gets back to the apartment, he finds that F has returned and sees her hands are bloody.
When Masuoka leaves his apartment, the woman in yellow follows and demands that he speak to her. He walks to an alley without speaking, and turns his camera on. The woman says she wants to see her girl, at which point Masuoka stabs her to death. Later, he murders a young girl whom he met under the pretense of filming pornography. He drains their blood into bottles and feeds it to F. Masuoka calls the pay phone and speaks to the stranger, who agrees that Masuoka is taking better care of F now. While filming for a news crew at the scene of the second murder, Masuoka sees a woman he filmed in her apartment previously. He takes F out of the apartment, and leaves her in a karaoke room to travel on his own for a period. Sitting on a dock, Masuoka discusses his interest in fear with Kuroki.
Masuoka becomes homeless and sleeps in the park where he killed the young girl. He briefly admits to himself that he murdered his wife and a stranger and treated his daughter like an animal, before seeing a pair of Deros and finding a cell phone that leads him back to his apartment to find F. His wife's ghost appears behind Masuoka in the elevator, and he enters the apartment to find F weak on the floor. She speaks to him for the first time, and he cuts his mouth at the corner to feed her. At the end of the film, F leads Masuoka back down into the underworld, and films him as it appears he has finally discovered the same fear that initially intrigued him.

Tags: murder

Review:
Thanks to his series of ghost stories, "Ju-on", Japanese director Takashi Shimizu has become one of the most recognized names of the New Wave of Asian horror cinema, the movement of young Asian directors that since the late 90s has produced some of the best and most original horror movies of the last years.
The enormous success of his "Ju-on" series took Shimizu to the U.S., in order to direct a remake of the third installment of the series ("Ju-on: The Grudge"), named simply as "The Grudge"; but right before working on the remake, Shimizu took some days with fellow director Shinya Tsukamoto and a small crew to make a very low-budget horror movie, pretty much on the style he used to make when "Ju-on" was a straight to video release, but this time with a very different kind of story.
Masuoka (Shinya Tsukamoto) is a freelance cameraman almost completely detached from the world and entirely focused on his preference for videotaping and doing camera-work.
The strange characteristics of this event, makes Masuoka to be obsessed with the idea of a fear so powerful that only death can erase, so in an attempt to understand Furoki's fear he descends into the underground tunnels of Tokio, discovering the entrance to a bizarre cavern that seems like a passage to the underworld.
He unchains her and takes her to his apartment, but soon he discovers that this girl (whom he names "F") is not a normal person, and that her presence in his world will make a darker side of him to come out."Marebito" was written by Chiaki Konaka (better known as the writer of the famous anime, "Serial Experiments Lain"), and like most of his works, it is a dark psychological story with a slight cometary on the relationship between humans and the technology they produce.
His relationship with the strange girl "F", and his attempts to establish communication with her become the focal point of the plot of "Marebito", although like in other works by Konaka, reality is not always what it seems.It seems that this "return to roots" was really beneficial for Takashi Shimizu, as the work he offers in "Marebito" is once again a very fresh and original horror movie that proves that there is more in this young director than the "Ju-on" series.
By working again on a shoestring budget, Shimizu is able to capture the simple and monotone life of Masuoka, and with the use of digital video he mimics the world as his main character sees it: a world through the camera lens.
However, a trait kept from "Ju-on", is Shimizu's skill to create ominous haunting atmospheres with common everyday objects, this time, the video screens and what's on them is the focus of the film.Shinya Tsukamoto is better known as the director of the remarkable and influential films like "Tetsuo" (1989) and "Tokyo Fist" (1995), but here he offers his talents as an actor in a film where he plays the main character.
Kazuhiro Nakahara, Miho Ninagawa and Shun Sugata appear in supporting roles, but their appearances are limited, as the movie focuses entirely on Masuoka and the consequences of his relationship with "F"."Marebito" is an excellent example of how imagination and a good plot can make a film work even with the most limited resources.
The use of digital camera may be annoying to those expecting a good looking film, but instead of being a flaw, its use in the film gives the story a realistic tone, as if we were really watching a person's descent into madness.
Some people have criticized the convoluted plot of Konaka's story, filled with many details and references that often make no sense or have twisted meanings in the movie; however, I find the storyline captivating because of that unpredictability, and the fact that Shimizu moves away from the ghost stories that have become typical of Asian horror is really refreshing.With his "Ju-on" ghost stories, Takashi Shimizu became known worldwide as a major horror director, but personally I think that "Marebito" is the movie that truly reveals him as a horror author.
It's not a movie destined to be a hit, but it's one that shows a different take on horror and while maybe "The Grudge" is the movie that most people relate to Shimizu, but personally, I think that "Marebito" is a much better and more satisfying movie.
The main character is a freelance videographer who makes a living filming the horrible things that people do to each other (and themselves) in the crowded yet isolated world of the big city.
The fact that she has no recognizable emotion or attachment, and lives only to feed on the blood of people is a projection of what he is so ashamed of.This film really gets into the feel of alienation (much the way "Clean, Shaven" and Cronenberg's "Spider" did) and makes you feel the way the populace who views his videos do.
It offers a bunch of pretty disturbing scenes, but one has to watch it at least twice, in order to fully comprehend it's twisted metaphoric.If you find this movie weird, just stop and think about how weirder is the whole mankind.
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.
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.
When he shots with his camera a man stabbing himself in the eye in the access to the subway, he seeks what the suicidal might have seen to experiment the same sense of horror the man felt when he died.
Masuika becomes a serial killer draining the blood of his victims to nurse F."Marebito" is a very weird low-budget movie that discloses the madness process of the lead character through his journey to hell in the underground of Tokyo.
An average effort by the director of Ju-On. Marebito starts out with an interesting premise, but somewhere along the way the movie falls apart.A camera man captures a man in the subway committing suicide by stabbing himself in the eye.
I appreciate what it is, which is a genuinely creepy movie shot in 8 days on consumer-grade digital video by one of the masters of Japanese horror.
'Marebito' is certainly better than your average US slasher flick, but don't expect much more than that.At the start, with the emphasis on voyeurism, recorded death and vicarious experience, it teeters on becoming something impressive and somehow relevant to the omniscience, nihilism and anonymity of the digital age.But the 'horror' aspects of this film completely ruin it.
Both the 'discovery' of a fantasy underworld, and then the clumsy Frankenstein narrative, are irredeemably hackneyed story lines that the director attempts to conceal behind portentous dialogue, edgy security-camera footage and a naked young woman.Like a lot of style-over-substance J-Horror films, the plot eventually comes to rely upon inexplicable twists and mysterious appearances that may excite some people's interest but in reality are the signs of bad writing and a half-baked story that can be modified with ease because nothing significant is taking place anyway.As for the 'hollow world' philosophy - it begs belief how pretentiously the film takes this, as if it has hit upon an entirely new idea.
Relentlessly making footage with an unearthly obsessiveness Masuoka (Shinya Tsukamoto) happens across a peculiar subway suicide, where an man named Furoki (Kazuhiro Nakahara) pokes out his eye, as if to stop himself from seeing something terrifying.
He soon descends into the vast underground system beneath the city of Tokyo, finally wandering into an otherworldly place, where he finds a naked chained female (Tomomi Miyashita)...After the success of "The Grudge" Takashi Shimuzu ventures into unusual horror territory with this independent low-key outing.
Cut off from the rapidly ageing J-horror ghost craze Shimuzu manages to come out with an obscure, but simultaneously edgy and vastly brilliant journey in the madness of the long forgotten Shaver mystery and his theories of the Hidden World - a world situated beneath the surface, an underground metropolis infested with blood-hungry creatures called 'deros' (or 'detrimental robots').
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.
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.
this movie sucked in every way, thin plot, no character development, flimsy acting, pretentious themes, clumsy production, super-low budget.nothing at all redemptive except maybe the hot girl and a decent beginning.
Its like a watching a mediocre student film that got way too much attention.This movie is generally so bad one does not know where to begin...If you watch the director/actor/producer interviews on the DVD you will find out that they shot it over 8 days on break while the director was making ju-on, this makes sense as they spent no time developing this movie and one has to wonder why they bothered at all.
Also known as 'The Stranger from Afar', this Japanese horror film focuses on a freelance photographer who rescues a naked woman chained to a rock in a subway tunnel; he takes her home, only to discover that she is more animalistic than human with a taste for blood.
Some of the symbolism hits home quite well too with the protagonist viewing himself as a vampire, feeding off filming the misery and pain of others (sort of like Jake Gyllenhaal's character in 'Nightcrawler', but with a moral compass here).
I thought it was supposed to be a horror movie, but it is more like a sterile view of something that could be scary just because of the subject matter, but doesn't come off that way.I had a pretty hard time watching the whole thing just because it was so boring.
Oh and one last thing if you feel the urge to watch a Japanese horror flick but don't want the normal crazy mess with your mind effect then this is the movie for you.
If you're looking for a unique Japanese horror film that will give you a major case of the creeps, check this out, but be prepared to be a little bored at times..
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.
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.
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..
He's obsessed with recapturing the terror he's seen on faces he's filmed, a feeling he says he's lost and can no longer experience.He wanders Tokyo with a camera attached to his face and becomes an observer so tightly connected to his lens that at times he appears to forget that people can see him.
It moved very, very slowly, which may have been an attempt to convey the main character's experience and quality of life.To me, this is almost like two separate films, akin to From Dusk Till Dawn, where the first half is sort of sick and violent and depressing, and the second half is a weird and eerie trip into a monster-movie.But this movie deliberately refuses to become exciting and remains subdued while interesting things are happening, which left me bored and wanting the movie to end already.I probably didn't "get" this movie, but even if I did, I can't say that the experience would have been much better.
Thank god for a film like Marebito, then.The film follow protagonist Masuoka, a cameraman who becomes obsessed with fear after capturing on tape the grisly suicide of a man, forced to take his own life after seeing something too disturbing to comprehend.
Throughout the film, Masuoka attempts to recapture the same sense of fear that man felt the day he died.You'd never think such an obscene and adventurous film could stem from Takashi Shimizu, after his countless Grudge remakes i began to wonder how much of a film-making soul the guy even had - But now it is obvious that when constrained to a week of shooting with a very limited budget, the man can work wonders.
at first i was expecting less from this film comparing to what i saw i just went to the movies in a lonely day..just the poster that caught my attention it read from the director of The Grudge..
i remember some characters called deros which made really feel fear like back then when i was child and a "girl" that drove him fall in terrible acts to keep her alive.....not just some evil acts you can stand, seriously one the best horror movies you will find..
The most obvious and important thing to keep in mind while watching Marebito is that the audience experiences everything from the main character's point of view.
On one level, which isn't revealed until nearly the end, you can interpret Marebito as a relatively simple film about a man, Masuoka (Shinya Tsukamoto), who has had a psychotic break and commits an outrageous, though relatively contained, series of crimes.
In addition to the psychotic madman stuff, at various times the film has elements of, or can be read as, a meditation on obsession, technological (especially video) fetishism, or voyeurism; a skeptical exploration of the attraction of horror and horror as entertainment (the protagonist can't quite grasp the attraction, but sees it in others, and wants to understand and experience it); a Dantean descent into Hell; a ghost story; a vampire story (both literal and psychological); and even a kind of love story with an extremely deviant eroticism.
The way a viewer contextualizes Marebito will likely continually change all the way to the end of the film, but the shifts are all as slight and smooth, and have all of the mind-bending illusory qualities as well as the interlocking aspects of the typical kinds of M.C. Escher prints.Shimizu is able to very quickly instantiate a palpable, atmospheric creepiness.
At the same time, Shimizu doesn't ever completely abandon the more fantastical material, and to the end, he leaves the film fairly open to a number of alternate interpretations.Not only for fans of Japanese horror films, Marebito is a "must see" film for anyone who can stomach the disturbing and who is not easily offended.
I just got back from seeing this at the Nuart in LA, and I gotta say, this is perhaps one of the weirdest horror films I've seen in quite a while.The plot revolves around a free-lance camera man who is apparently obsessed with fear- he tapes a man as he commits suicide, people arguing, and what creates fear.
And second, once you've figured out that what you're seeing are the viewpoint character's hallucinations, all bets are off, anything can happen, and suspense goes out the window.Marebito, however, is saved from also-ran status by the masterful direction of Takashi Shimizu and an excellent performance by Shinya Tsukamoto as Masuoka.
He takes her home, tries to get her to adapt to his world, and finds she only likes blood.OK well you know this film is very creepy.
I know it's a horror film but that's why I don't like it.
After filming a man committing suicide in a Tokyo subway, "Masuoka" (Shin'ya Tsukamoto) becomes obsessed in his quest to understand what real fear feels like.
The film follows Masuoka (played by Tetsuo helmer, Shinya Tsukamoto) as he quits taking his Prozac and heads below the city of Tokyo to try and terrify himself.
This gives the picture a very cheap, grainy and constantly mobile quality, which, when edited together alongside the actual footage of Tsukamoto's camera-man character, helps to further blur the lines between fantasy and reality.Like I said, it's a fascinating film on both a creative and intellectual level; but if you're looking for a great HORROR film, then this isn't it.