3 out of 5

Director: Takashi Shimizu

This is a tough one. Marebito dawdles with all of those themes common in Japanese horror – creepy pasty people who walk weird, elements of revenge, accepted oddities like telepathy – but creeps into new territory every 15 minutes or so, keeping you watching, wondering whats coming next. It leans toward being dissatisfying overall, but not in a misleading way. The film never implies that its leading to something specific, rather that its just leading its viewer… Apparently shot between larger projects, Marebito starts with a cameraman who captures a suicide on film, then becoming obsessed with the terror he feels is present in the mans eyes before his death – not fear of death, but fear of some unknown, unseen thing. Hunting this unknown down leads – in a dreamlike fashion – to underground caverns with elements of Shavers Amazing Tales and Lovecrafts stories of the ancients. This is your first taste of the weird blend of this movie – regular creeps (flashed images of creepy crawling people) and then a trip to the underground mountains, which are like an old-school painted background and well lit. Our lead here discovers a feral girl who he ends up taking care of for the rest of the movie, meanwhile, perhaps, degenerating into a madness that may or may not have caused him to kill his wife… Sound a bit wayward? It is. Thankfully the tone is consistently wandering, and so it unfolds reasonably. The film requires some patience, and is not directly scary or creepy, but it is fascinating that something more effective than the normal ghost story was produced as a seeming keep-busy project between larger works.