Missing Child Videotape (2024)

Original title: ミッシング・チャイルド・ビデオテープ

Keita (Rairu Sugita) is somewhat obsessed with helping find kids who get lost in woods and mountains - and he’s rather good at it, as well. He doesn’t appear to let anyone get very close to him. His roommate Tsusaka (Amon Hirai), a part time teacher with the ability to see ghosts (being Japanese, the film is very matter of fact about this), is probably his closest friend, and even he doesn’t really know what drives Keita. He does know that Keita’s little brother disappeared somehow when they were both still children, but his friend has never really gone into any details.

This changes when one of the parcels of parental detritus Keita’s mother has begun to send him following the death of his father contains a videotape young Keita himself shot on the day of the disappearance. There’s something off about the thing apart from its inexplicable content, and slowly but surely, a supernatural dread begins to engulf the two friends, as if something other than human – and certainly not just a little kid’s ghost – were calling for them.

Eventually, they, as well as a journalist (Kokoro Morita) who has become interested in the case for reasons more complicated as they first appear, decide to travel to Keita’s childhood country home. There, things become increasingly disturbing.

In many aspects, Ryota Kondo’s Missing Child Videotape – despite the title not a POV horror film – harkens back to the height of J-horror. Its mythology – as vaguely explained as it is - is certainly steeped as much in Japanese supernatural folklore as it is in contemporary internet interpretations of the same. Unlike its obvious predecessors, it isn’t really interested in updating the technological elements of the haunting much further than the late analogue, early digital era they were situated in. This doesn’t appear so much as an attempt at being retro than a focus on a certain timelessness. These supernatural things don’t belong to any specific time and place, are indeed dissolving our concepts of time and place, so the film isn’t interested in being about technology that hasn’t settled into becoming a thing of a vague past (even for us who experienced it live) either.

Formally, this takes a lot from the approach of Kiyoshi Kurosawa in his J-horror phase, more so than from Takashi Shimizu (who produced the film), or Hideo Nakata. There’s a slowness and calmness to the film that feels very Kurosawa, shots that linger, as well as a build up of dread that does only very seldom end in anything traditionally shocking (though when it does, it hits). This is all about creating a mood of dread, of quiet but intense isolation, and the equally quiet pressure to open one’s old wounds again and again.

The film’s very deliberate pacing and its unspectacular treatment of what would be its main set pieces will probably not work for some viewers – this is never leaving the border between slow and deliberate and just slow – and its unwillingness to explain itself in detail goes against much of the current taste. You can practically feel the irate YouTubers babbling about “plot holes” when they mean “crap we have to figure out for ourselves or might even have to accept as ambiguous, like much in actual life”.

Me, I felt utterly at home in Missing Child Videotape’s idea of dread, its pacing and its ambiguities. I am, indeed, a bit floored by it.