Ayaka Satomi (Noriko Sakai) and her husband Hideki (Hiroshi Mikami) are driving through the Japanese countryside with their little daughter Nana (Hana Inoue). When they stop so that Hideki can use a phone booth to transfer some files to his employer, the man finds a ripped apart, dirty sheet of newspaper right in front of his eyes. The headline that catches his eye reports the death of a child named Nana Satomi, hit by an oncoming truck while out with her parents, complete with a photo of his daughter. Hideki is puzzled and disturbed, but before he can anything, a truck does in fact hit the car with his daughter in it.
Three years later, Ayaka and Hideki's feelings of guilt for the death of Nana have driven them to divorce. Ayaka is working in parapsychology now, searching for answers to questions she isn't willing to ask loudly, while Hideki has become the kind of teacher who never looks at his students. It doesn't look like he is willing to risk having a life outside the classroom anymore either.
The state of fugue the ex-couple is in is broken when both of them are independently experiencing some very strange things. Especially Hideki is haunted by strange lapses of time and reality, as well as further premonitions of doom brought by appearances of the newspaper.
I found Yogen to be a much better film than I had expected after reading the usual lukewarm reviews (lukewarm reviews for good movies and good reviews for utter tosh seem to be a theme for me in the last few weeks). Its director Norio Tsuruta is also responsible for the very interesting Kakashi.
Yogen belongs to the decidedly non-naturalistic school of Japanese horror (think Takashi Shimizu with a deeper interest in people). If you need detailed explanations for supernatural events or more logical than emotional coherence in your films, this is probably not made for you. Tsuruta never bothers to explain anything about the newspaper, he seems much more interested in using the weird as a metaphor for the state of mind his characters are in after losing their daughter, quite effectively so, at that.
Although creeping the viewer out obviously isn't the film's main goal (and really, the couple losing their daughter is rather more touching than another spring-loaded cat), there are still some moments that are profoundly disturbing, less through shock value than through a quality of weirdness the better Japanese horror films often strive for.
Again, Yogen is a film better experienced than rationalized - if you are willing to accept it on its on terms.
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