Past Misdeeds: The Incite Mill (2010)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only the most basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


Looking at the career of director Hideo Nakata, I can't avoid the impression he had his difficulties recovering from the catastrophe that was the US The Ring 2, possibly because being responsible for that one is a shame someone with even a little bit of pride in his work would have a hard time living down.

In Nakata's case, his decline isn't as horrible as it could be. In fact, compared with Takashi Shimizu, the state of Nakata's career is absolutely golden, seeing as he's not making something called Rabbit Horror 3D, and doesn't seem to have lost all his talent while slumming in Hollywood. The Incite Mill is a clear demonstration that he still has what made me fall in love with his earlier films.

The Incite Mill is a pretty typical entry into a sub-genre of the thriller occupied with putting a bunch of characters into an artificially locked down place, having them submit to peculiar and bizarre rules and observing them fastly starting to kill each other off, in part because People Ain't No Good™, in part because the party responsible for their imprisonment does some subtle and some not so subtle things to, well, incite them to murder. In this variation, the characters have come to the place of their imprisonment out of their own volition, for the promise of a surprising amount of money for just seven days of work in a psychological experiment. Of course, they didn't expect quite as much violence, nor that they'd be the stars in one of these popular Internet shows nobody in the cast has ever heard of you only encounter in movies.

As this is a Japanese movie, the rules element is quite heavily emphasised, emphasizing one of the hobby horses of Japanese pop culture of the last ten years or so in what I presume to be a reaction to the country's still heavily restrictive and regimented society and the resulting pressures to conform on the individual.

There are also many allusions to classic manor mysteries (ten little Indians ahoy), and the Cluedo-inspiring (or Clue-inspiring for you Americans) construction of that very mechanical sub-genre.At times, Nakata seems to want to escape the heavy artificiality of his set-up by pointing it out himself. To a degree, this works pretty well, though I couldn't help but begin to question parts of the story's basic set-up I would probably not have questioned in a movie less knowingly artificial. Just to take an obvious example: how come the police hasn't gotten involved if this is not the first time this little show has been broadcast? I can believe in police laziness and incompetence without a problem, but I'm pretty sure this sort of thing would at least have been in every news show in the country, and therefore nothing the characters could not know about. And while I'm thinking about logical problems, how is it that most of the characters actually believe anyone (especially people who never ever show their faces to them) would pay enormous amounts of money for them to take part in a simple psychological experiment? I find this sort of thing much harder to believe than the existence of ghosts, aliens, and vampires, but your mileage may very well vary.

The Incite Mill's best moments are interesting enough to let me forget these doubts, however. Besides taking cues from manor mysteries and the brethren in its own sub-genre, the film also does some things that are bound to help a guy like me forget little niggles like logic problems and a lack of coherent worldbuilding. Namely, there is a slight SF element in the form of one of these new-fangled ceiling-bound robots with impressive gripper arms (as well as some useful gadgets). Even though it isn't talking or beeping melodically like a good robot should, it's still there to throw people in jail, inefficiently patrol the Paranoia House's (yes, that's how the place of the experiment is named - surely no reason to get paranoid) corridors at night, and to delight my heart to no end. After all, everything is better with robots.

I'd be remiss in my duties if I didn't mention the good ensemble cast, consisting - among others - of actual movie star Tatsuya Fujiwara (with whom Nakata has worked before on the superior Death Note spinoff L: Change the World), veteran actor Kinya Kitaoji, veteran TV actress Nagisa Katahira, and some other members of the TV actor and idol business (Haruka Ayase, Satomi Ishihara, Takura Ohno and others). All of them (yes, even the male idols) deliver performances that are generally convincing and often even quite intense. There's never the feeling that you're watching idols act. Rather, these are actors who also take part in the idol rat race, but do know about more than pushing their physical assets into the camera. There's a certain degree of overacting on display, but overacting seems to fit the hysteria-inducing situation the characters are in quite well. Plus, I prefer conscious and artful overacting to the near-catatonic blandness that is so trendy in English language cinema right now. I understand, all that botox makes one's face difficult to move, but still…


Hideo Nakata for his part has never been a flashy director, usually preferring a style that subtly influences an audience’s perception of a story and its characters to one that is always pointing at the director's technical abilities but which usually works to the detriment of the narrative. Nakata is too self-assured a director to have much of a need for showing off. If you want to see his technical accomplishments, you will find them in the careful framing of scenes, in the precise rhythms his films' editing creates, and in Nakata's strong sense for iconic imagery that works as an actual, living part of his movies. In The Incite Mill, Nakata shows that all of these talents are still alive and well in him, serving him as well in his new genre of choice as they did when he was making the horror films which made me fall in love with Japanese horror.

The Visitor in the Eye (1977)

Original title: Hitomi no naka no houmonsha

Some weird tennis boarding school in Weird Japan™. Aspiring young tennis player Chiaki (Nagisa Katahira) sees her dreams of a tennis heroic future of doing her best shattered when her young teacher Imaoka (Shingo Yamamoto) hits one of her eyes very badly with a ball, blinding her in it. Chiaki does the full brave heroine who doesn’t mind having her dreams crushed routine but Imaoka feels so guilty – a feeling certainly heightened by him being maybe a wee bit inappropriately in love with his student – he’ll do anything to help her get her eyesight back, something your normal men of medicine just won’t be able to help with.

Which leads our teacher friend directly to the man we know and love as Black Jack (house favourite Jo Shishido), rogue surgeon, sometimes mad scientist, and all-around grump. Black Jack wants a lot of money for the operation but most of all, he needs Imaoka to provide a replacement cornea for Chiaki. And, no, he’s not going to take up Imaoka on his offer of one of his own corneas. That’d be stupid! Insert Jo Shishido hitting an innocent table with full force here. Anyway, Imaoka does what any young man in love would do and breaks into the nearest eye bank (that’s what the film calls it, and who are we to doubt its wisdom in things medical?).

The ensuing cornea transplant works out well, and soon Chiaki is playing tennis again, young love is blooming between student and teacher (who, shocked reader, is basically her age, so stay calm) and the film is all set for a treacly happy end after only thirty minutes. Alas, Chiaki starts seeing a goofily sinister guy in a cloak whenever she is close to water. She’s feeling rather drawn to her hallucination too, so when she encounters the man from her vision in real life she’s already more than halfway in love with him. The mysterious man with the dubious taste in clothing is Shiro Kazama (Toru Minegishi who manages to act even more melodramatically than his character is written), as melodramatic a pianist as his cloak wearing habit suggests, and feels as deeply drawn to Chiaki as she is to him. Does he have a rather gothic romance style secret that just might get Chiaki killed? Of course he does, he’s a melodramatic artistic soul wearing a cloak!

After and through some other business I’m not going to get into now, apart from telling you it’s weird, Imaoka and Chiaki’s best friend and tennis double partner Kyoko (played by another house favourite, the wonderful Etsuko Shihomi) try to find out what the heck is up with Chiaki now, and will perhaps learn a terrible secret in time to safe her life.

It might come as a bit of a disappointment that this weird concoction concerning Osamu Tezuka’s wild and wonderful manga character Black Jack in a live action adventure doesn’t actually feature too much of Black Jack himself, particularly since Shishido plays him with the charming and hilarious style of overacting that befits a character as exalted as everyone’s favourite rogue surgeon. It’s really more of a slightly long-ish cameo, but then, the sheer scenery-chewing of Shishido might have eaten up all the beautiful scenery as well as the consciously artificial sets director Nobuhiko Obayashi throws at his audience’s corneas.

Obayashi is well loved around these parts for his epochal – and epochally weird – female coming of age tale Hausu. The Visitor in the Eye is stylistically cut very much from the same cloth as the director’s master piece (not too surprising seeing as they were apparently shot during the course of the same 12 months). So expect the director to have an astonishing control over all the technical aspects of filmmaking, but also expect him to use none of these techniques in a sane – or at least common way – with tonal shifts between the broadest comedy and off-beat gothic romance being the least of the peculiarities a viewer will encounter. There are beautiful shots (Obayashi is a great fan of extremely artificial orange sun light) that are at once nearly painfully kitschy, inspired, and campily ironic, staging of scenes that revels in the artificial nature of everything in this movie, sudden switches in the score from the diegetic to the non-diegetic that might cause one whiplash once one begins noticing them, and so much visual information that seems coded in at least three ways at the same time, uniting conscious camp, absolute earnestness, and plain weirdness.

The script, very much in the spirit of some of Tezuka’s work, loves these shifts between high-brow, low-brow and what the hell just as much, going into short digressions of bizarre humour (even for a viewer by now somewhat accustomed to Japanese tastes in these things), inserting pretty insane cameos (personal favourite is Sonny Chiba rolling in wearing a cowboy outfit and grinning as a loon getting hit on the ass with a pan by Shihomi in a perfectly pointless yet wonderful scene), sudden genre shifts, and a heightened emotional intensity that is as silly as it is awesome.

As regular readers will know, I’m not generally a big fan of the camp approach but the way Obayashi handles it in his better films – a group to which this one most certainly belongs - always does manage to get me, perhaps because the director’s camp is often as beautiful as it is silly and usually seems very much to have an actual point beyond the power of posturing. Because, as Hausu is a film about a young girl growing into a young woman (while fighting off melons, woman-eating pianos and so on), The Visitor in the Eye appears to me very much to be a film about different kinds of love, comparing the oversized kind of ROMANCE(!) that can end in things like double suicide to the just as honest, just as intense, but more quotidian thing a guy like Imaoka has to offer. The former, of course, is rather attractive, but it is also less real than the latter. Sorry, Norah Ephron.

Now, while I think The Visitor in the Eye is a rather wonderful film (if you can cope with the sensory overload or even do as I do and rather relish it after a while), I still think Hausu is Obayashi’s masterpiece, because the latters weirdnesses are even greater yet also more on point with what the film is trying to say, and its tonal shifts feel more organic in its way. But then, this might come down to personal taste. Plus, saying a film is not quite as brilliant as Hausu, is not exactly a put-down in my house.

On WTF: The Incite Mill (2010)

While the once great Takashi Shimizu makes absolutely horrible films now, that other core director of the Japanese horror renaissance Hideo Nakata seems to have slowly recovered from his horrible US The Ring 2. Nakata's making thrillers with SF elements now, and he's actually very good at it.

Case in point is The Incite Mill, the film I talk about at length over at WTF-Film today.

 

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Kyofu

aka The Sylvian Experiments

Since she, her husband and her two little daughters caught a glimpse of what she and hubbie interpreted as the afterlife while watching old film reels of cruel brain experiments during World War II, neuroscientist Etsuko (Nagisa Katahira) has been obsessed with finding a way to take these experiments of stimulating the Sylvian area of the brain with electricity directly applied to the brain tissue even further. This obsession costs her the life of her husband and the love of her two daughters.

After years of research, the mad scientist has formed a conspiracy out of various younger members of the medical profession who think they owe her enough to take part in insane, highly illegal experiments. The group sets up a fake suicide club and kidnaps its four members to continue their fascist predecessors' nasty little experiments. As luck (or is it planning?) will have it, one of Etsuko's victims is her own daughter Miyuki (Yuri Nakamura).

Miyuki and the other girl among Etsuko's four victims react all too well to the treatment. A bubble of nightmarish feelings begins to surround the girls as if the membrane between this world and somewhere else were growing thin all around them. Eventually the girls just disappear from their cell.

While all this has been going on, Etsuko's other daughter Kaori (Mina Fujii) has been trying to find the kidnapped Miyuki. Thanks to her psychological connection to her sister, Kaori too starts suffering from strange visions and a growing feeling of dread, and is inexorably drawn into her mother's secret experiment.

Kyofu, directed by Hiroshi Takahashi, who was as a writer responsible for the scripts to Hideo Nakata's wonderful Ringu trilogy, is the sort of Japanese horror film I would not have dared to hope for in these times when even Takashi Shimizu's talent is slowly dissolving in front of our eyes. It's slow, carefully and cautiously directed and written, philosophically dark and either very cryptic or very ambiguous.

My synopsis really doesn't do the experience of watching Kyofu justice. While the above might sound relatively straightforward and clear, the film's actual execution is anything but. The film's beginning half hour does not tell its tale in linear, chronological fashion, but seems to circle around the story it is telling, compelling the audience to share the feeling of falling and confused unreality its characters are experiencing. Once the set-up's done, the film's structure grows calmer and more direct, Miyuki becoming the story's protagonist.

Yet even then, Takahashi keeps up his pressure on the audience's expectations of what is real and what not, never making clear how real the things Miyuki sees and experiences actually are, what exactly is dream, what vision, and what reality. The director mostly achieves this effect through stylistic decisions that might just kill Kyofu for the impatient. Primarily, Takahashi keeps everything that happens on screen slow. Every camera movement, every edit seems to happen with a calmness and distance to the proceedings so deliberate and cold that a viewer will either slowly begin to share the character's dread and their feelings of stepping into somewhere else, or just feel bored by it. Depending on a viewer's tastes, one of these effects will be further strengthened by the movie's acting style. Takahashi has clearly convinced his actors to underplay their roles heavily, quite in contrast to the favoured Japanese acting style of the hour that sometimes seems to be based on constant mugging. Hardly a facial muscle is moved, bodily movements are slow and ponderous, and everyone's enunciation seems - at least as far as I understand it - too precise and unnaturally deliberate.

Most of the actors are giving surprisingly effective performances with this technique, giving the impression of people caught somewhere between sleepwalking and facing a dread so far outside their ability to verbalize it that they can hardly function as human beings anymore, if, in fact, they ever could.

I'm not as convinced by the dialogue, which does at times sound rather silly. Though I'm - for example - sure "please wipe away the smell of my sister's blood" is an invitation to hot sexy times somewhere, I'm quite positive it's not on our planet. How much of this problem (and it's a minor one to me), is caused by the fansubs I saw the film with is quite another question entirely. I'm pretty hopeful that Lionsgate's official English language release will do a bit better in that respect.

Another definite weakness are the film's special effects. It's the type of CG effects that I can appreciate on a conceptual level, but whose realization is hardly anything to be proud of or be impressed by.

On the positive side, haters of dark-haired ghosts (something I never understood, by the way - you don't go into a zombie movie complaining it's about zombies either, or do you?), will not have to dirty their pure, pure eyes with even a single one of them. Instead, Kyofu's horrors are more of the mostly unseen, often formless type I can't help but take as a Lovecraftian influence. This is, after all, a movie stating that there's nothing for us waiting on the other side, but that nothing will still eat us. Which is a concept that I find much creepier than a normal (even be-tentacled!) monster would be.

All this - the good and the bad - does of course lead to a film that will clearly just not work at all for some of its viewers. I'm pretty happy with just going with a very slow and deliberate film, and just stepping into the world of idea's Takahashi is building on screen, but even I can see that this will not be true for anyone. For me, Kyofu's mood of dread and dire expectation just works, its flaws and peculiar directorial decisions come together into a fascinating artefact, but films based on mood and ideas alone are always in danger of only working for people who can consciously decide to get into them.

I could, and so I'm all too happy to recommend it.

 

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