Past Misdeeds: The Crone (2013)

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.

Original title: Kosoku baba

The two less popular members of the idol group Jersey Girls, Nanami and Mayuko, hate their group’s very own star (if you want to use that word in the kind of bottom-feeder entertainment world these girls are working in) Ayane with a degree of passion - at the very least enough to let out their hatred in the kind of physical "pranks" that can't be described as friendly anymore.

As if this weren't unpleasant enough, the newest episode of their TV show sees the girls visiting an empty, supposedly haunted, nursing home. Alas, the haunting is more than just a supposed one, and soon Ayane, who was the first to enter the building, is plagued by the titular crone, a ghost that doesn't just delight in a lot of fast skittering but also brings with her the dubious pleasures of decay, age, and physical abuse. Even though Ayane is the first to suffer, the curious curse eventually reaches out for all three of the girls, as well as to their handler and the show's director. More ghostly skittering and physical ickiness abound.

Idol-culture based horror has become a bit of a thing in Japanese low budget horror in the last couple of years, and it's easy to see why: a production can hire idols instead of “real” actors, which probably comes quite a bit cheaper, it can latch onto whatever fan base said idols possess, and when in doubt, nobody involved has to do too much acting.

Surprisingly enough, the idol actresses involved in this part of another attempt to re-light the J-horror fire, Honoka Miki, Shiori Kitayama and Kaoru Goto, aren't playing themselves, and are giving perfectly decent performances, not only when it comes to screaming but also in the slightly heightened awkwardness of the idoling (that's the verb, right?) they bring to the movie. That's all you can ask of young women in their late teens with little actual acting experience, and really all The Crone needs; it even gives one hope for a future for these actresses as actresses.

While The Crone is clearly a very cheap production - just look at the Crone make-up to realize how cheap - made in very limited shooting time, director and scriptwriter Eisuke Naito does some interesting things with what he has to work with. This is a film where all the different, and increasingly freaky, ways the supernatural shows itself are actually connected to plot and theme, with nothing happening that isn't textual or subtextual part of the horrors of the helplessness of the aged, physical abuse and decay. In this context, making the film's protagonists idols, living symbols of an unhealthy obsession with youth and physical perfection if ever there were one, seems particularly clever, not just because the girls are logical figures of hate for the film's specific ghost but also, the film seems to suggest, because the kind of objectification inherent in idol culture is entwined with the hatred for the old and their physical imperfections like a Siamese twin.

Naito's film is really surprisingly resonant in this way, demonstrating a willingness to be a bit deeper than your typical cheap spook-fest usually shows, as well as suggesting a director possessing an ability to actually see his ideas through to the end. There's a good sense for contemporary anxieties underlying the proceedings, perhaps even a bit of absolutely appropriate hysteria, which is more than I can say about much praised films like The Conjuring that never seem interested in anything but the shocks without ever having an idea what the shocks are supposed to be there for.

The Crone's comparative intellectual depth is helpful in other regards, too, for as a mere horror show, the film isn't quite as effective as you'd wish for, or rather, it is professional and often imaginative when it comes to its supernatural affairs, but it is seldom scary, nor does it induce the kind of breathlessness an audience should sometimes feel in an effective horror film. I'm not sure the film is even trying to scare its audience as much as it wants to transport it into a world of increasing strangeness while keeping inside the lines of the themes it has chosen. More often than not, The Crone succeeded with this for me, in part certainly because I expected rather something more in the vein of the last two direct-to-DVD Ju-on movies, or of whatever the last Ring movie was supposed to be. While Naito's film doesn't necessarily succeed in all it sets out to do, there's a lot to say for a film and a director who at the very least seem to care about what they are doing.

I also found the film's moments of body horror quite effective, scenes clearly more in the tradition of the grotesque that runs through a lot of Japanese art than in that of David Cronenberg, and all the stronger for it (sorry, Mr Cronenberg).

Visually, the film is shot in a style closer to Japanese horror of the late 90s and early 2000s with a limited colour scheme that is neither based on blue nor on yellow, and a look that can't quite hide its low budget but which does suggest actual thought has been put into things like composition, blocking, and camera work that isn't plain boring. You could call it retro, or you could call it an attempt to shoot a film not looking like a reality TV show; I'd certainly go for the latter.

Having said all this, I probably need to emphasise that The Crone isn't the kind of film that will resonate with everyone as much as it does with me, for make no mistake, while all the rather delightful subtext is in there, this still is a very basic, very cheap piece of low budget horror in plot and structure. It just smuggles quite a bit of contraband into your brain if you let it.