Rating: 3/5
Cult Movie Challenge 2016 | 39/52 | J-Horror
Takuyoshi Masuoka is a freelance cameraman who carries his camera everywhere.
For work, he captures footage of a man shoving a knife into his eye to commit suicide. Like Masuoka, the man was a freelance agent with no affiliations.
The experience drives Masuoka to explore fear and the unexplained. He’s determined to film that fear at any cost. His research takes him underground.
The film explores the distancing effect of the camera and how it can make even actual footage feel fake or staged. This movie came out when shock sites like goatse and rotten.com were sharing gore and murder videos that kids my age were watching.
The film also incorporates H. P. Lovecraft’s fixations of the unreliable narrator and horror so incomprehensible that it drives the witness insane. Can the camera operator capture the horror without being affected? Is he willing to risk it?
The handheld camera footage has interlacing artifacts that help distinguish it from the film’s digital footage. It also further enforces the unreality of the experience.
Unfortunately, once the movie ventures underground, the terror dissipates considerably.
We still have a bit of Gothic dread and surrealism that keeps the movie entertaining and the story ambiguous.