Ju-Rei is a strange little film. It is a Japanese Direct-to-Video production with many of the problems that typically plagues these movies, like mostly bad acting and a non-budget. Additionally it is highly derivative of Takashi Shimizu's Ju-On and uses all clichés connected with the terrible word "J-Horror" (to digress a little: I daily pray for the person who coined that abomination to be visited by a little blue boy).
But its director Koji Shiraishi (who would go on to direct the higher budgeted and very good Noroi) does a few quite inspired things:
- He uses the problematic device of telling the episodic story backwards, starting with "Chapter 10" and counting down to the prologue, surprisingly well, leaving the viewer with the knowledge that all will end as badly as it began
- Most of the chapters contain at least one moment of brilliant framing - Shiraishi really knows how to use static shots to creep the viewer out
- The film makes good use of the claustrophobic feel much of modern Japan seems to have. As a Westerner, one tends to forgot that Japan isn't just high-tech and modernism, but also people living in small, anonymous spaces
- Ghosts who are society's unpaid dues, work as a kind of infection that eats a society from inside out
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