Utsui is a director working on segments for a TV show that shows paranormal phenomena in as sensational a way as possible. Utsui himself is rather sceptic concerning his work. He doesn't believe in the ghosts the people he meets are supposed to be possessed by. Instead he is convinced that his "victims" are mostly severely mentally ill. He learned something about mental illness himself when his girlfriend started to suffer under a clinical depression. A week after the clinic she stayed in released her as stable, she committed suicide, right in front of Utsui, whose last words to her were something in the manner of "We talk later, gotta work".
Since then his work has started to trouble him - isn't he responsible for using ill people to further his career?
His newest project doesn't help his conscience at all. The brother of a young woman called Runa claims his sister to be possessed by ghosts and agrees to letting Utsui and his crew performing and filming an exorcism on her. Utsui doesn't believe the story about the ghosts. Runa's behavior reminds him too much of his dead girlfriend and he is sure the woman is heavily depressive. So everything is set up for a nice way to redemption for the director. There is just the small problem that there really is something supernatural going on around Runa.
What is it Utsui's sound technician met in the siblings' house? Has the mould that starts to grow on Utsui's wall and also on Utsui's hand something to do with it? Shouldn't someone try to stop the transmission of Runa's show segment before something terrible happens?
Dead Waves is a film that is a lot better than I suspected when I first heard about it. Its script may take some elements from Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Kairo and the British TV production Deathwatch, but what it does with them is independent enough from its predecessors to be interesting. I found the way Utsui's feelings of guilt push him in exactly the wrong direction concerning Runa surprisingly well set up. It's just a shame that not one of the actors is good enough to use the full potential the script shows. Mostly, there are a lot of vacant looks and bored looking performances.
Director and script writer Yoichiro Hayama does his best to adapt to the non-style of his actors. The first forty minutes of Dead Waves consist of the kind of static shots someone like Hideo Nakata can imbue with meaning and a brooding sense of doom, but that often just feel boring in lesser hands like Hayama's. Luckily, the last half hour of the film suddenly gets a lot more dynamic and interesting, as if someone behind the camera had decided to awaken from a deep sleep.
For all its flaws Dead Waves is still a watchable movie that starts to develop some original ideas of its own.
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