A small TV crew ventures into the long deserted house of the famous artist Mamiya to restore and film the last fresco he had made before his death.
Unfortunately the locals decide not to warn producer Kazuo (Ichiro Furutachi) and his friends about the the fact that the mansion is as cursed as it looks.
It doesn't take very long until at least his co-producer Akiko (Nobuko Miyamoto) realizes that something is very wrong with the estate. Soon their presenter/restorer acts ever stranger, finally digging up a mutilated baby corpse buried in the garden.
Not everyone will survive the following hours. Even when Akiko and Kazuo finally realize what the vengeful ghost who directs the carnage (and it will be bloody carnage) wants, they can't just give it to her, when "it" is Kazuo's daughter Emi (Nokko).
Fortunately the local gas station owner knows a little bit about exorcism (and singing).
Sweet Home is Kiyoshi Kurosawa's first horror film. Stylistically it is a very different beast from his usually slow and brooding later work, possibly thanks to the influence of its producer Juzo Itami, who was a kind of Japanese blockbuster machine in a time when few Japanese films were commercially successful. If I believe what I have read, Itami's influence on this production was heavy, some even go so far as to call him the real director of the piece.
To my mind, Sweet Home looks like the work of a highly talented but inexperienced director in commercial mode. The film is much faster and less subtle than anything else I know of by Kurosawa, but never so fast as to ignore his talent for moody lighting (including some uses of shadow that remind me of Val Lewton) or his interest in his (here somewhat melodramatic) characters. If you are looking at it from the right direction, the film even shows an early interest in one of the main themes Kurosawa has explored again and again - loneliness. Although, this being a much less personal production, here loneliness is something that is very much surmountable through struggle, a position far from Kurosawa's later pessimism.
That said, this is not a lost classic. Too often the film shows the carnival ride tendencies that make Poltergeist and similar films so decidedly non-spooky, and is very much at odds with its more effective, creepy moments. The Poltergeist comparison is apt in another way, too. Both films are a sort of paean to the burgeois family unit, with the Japanese movie as the more progressive piece that emphasizes choice over tradition.
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