TRAILER

Magazine story from hell: choice Japanese horror

The Japanese excel at horror and did so before there were films. Kôji Shiraishi is a skilled practitioner of the cinematic kind. He has already contributed to the genre with Noroi: The Curse (2005), Carved: The Slit-Mouthed Woman (2007), Occult (2009), and Sadako vs. Kayako (2016). For a review of these see Nina Doherty in Eastern Kicks. This one has lots of found footage as they do. It's been complimented for its more polished, high quality effects. They are sparing, and fine. The final one is a very, very creepy delight to the eye. I've truly never seen anything quite like it. Koji never relies on crude shocks but rather on a slow accumulation of unease. The basic ingredients are not unusual here, but they are finely woven together, all linked by cosmic menace.

The story's foreground focus is staff members of a certalin Ultra Mystery Magazine . They have a subject to write about that is mystifying and troubling and the whole country is talking about it. There is a boy who has disappeared. There are signs of something strange. A certain image recurs: on a square of paper, a stick figure is drawn in the center, a Japanese character repeated in each of the four corners. There keep being variations on this popping up. Is it a talisman or a warning or a threat? There are more missing children, haunted livestreams, and a hint of mass hysteria is arising. The magazine is to publish an article about all this, all of which seems to be happening in the Kinki region.

But the senior writer on the magazine, Tekeshi Sayama (Atom Shukugawa), disappears, and not before something gross happens to an important part of his face. Freelancer Chihiro Seno (Miho Kanno) is assigned the rush job of finishing Sayama's story. She calls in an old friend, Yûsei Ozawa (Eiji Akaso). to help. While Shukugawa is distinguished looking, with an arresting mound of gray hair, the thirtyish Chihiro is a cutie, and it's no surprise that he was a model and in a boy idol band in earlier days. But Ozawa's friend Chehiro is harder to place, and her true nature will not emerge until later and that will be the climax of the film which we cannot reveal.

Chihiro and Ozawa travel around in a car investigating. Is this a mundane Japan? Yes, and the more disturbing for the way dreadful events occur there, disappearances, defacings, a chid's suicide by hanging, other suicides too awful - and too real - to describe here. The score by Gary Ashiya and Kohei Shigemori through all this is terrific, extremely effective yet sparing. In the end we have come somewhere not so ordinary, to the foot of Mount Fuji, Japan's most famous site. Not for the first time we (with the two journalists have found a rather worn shabby traditional Japanese archway or torii, and under it a shrine whose contents also we will not describe. But I will say there is an abundance of children's playthings whose presence is ominous, and there is a room hung with hundreds of hanging ropes. By way of found footage, Shiraishi has a lot of fun with broken, distressed video footage that crackles and starts and stops. Familiar as this device is by now, it still seems fresh.

The initially friendly comradeship of Chihiro and Ozawa steadily deteriorates under the stress of finding cumulative doom and growing terror wherever they go, and there will be a disturbing twist to the implications of lost children and bereavement.

Based on a horror bestseller by Sesuji, originally serialized on the website Kakuyomu in 2023. Sesuji's novel is a "found footage"-style mockumentary presented as a collection of magazine articles, interviews, and records (nicely visualized for the film) written by a friend and colleagues of an occult magazine editor who mysteriously vanished while investigating paranormal phenomena. I think seeing the crowds of children referred to in the tale may be one of the most troubling parts of the film realization, but without having read the novel, I think it's still a fair guess that Shiraishi has presented it well. He has collaborated on the script along with the author, and screenwriter Tetsuya Oishi.

For fans of Japanese horror this is an absolute must-see. It has its North American premiere at the NYAFF at Lincoln Center day after tomorrow. Most of the festival is sold out, but check for additional screenings.

Kinki.近畿地方のある場所について ("About a Certain Place in the Kinki Region"), 104 mins., premiered in Japan Aug. 8, 2025. It showed also at Bangkok International Film Festival, the Jogja-NETPAC Asian Film Festival (Indonesia), Imagine (Amsterdam), Fantasy Filmfdst (Germany),Fantastic Film Festival (Aoustralia). Screened for this review as part of the NYAFF, where it has its North American premiere. Showtime:
Thursday July 23, 8:45pm
Walter Reade Theater
Film at Lincoln Center
Includes intro and Q&A with
Koji Shiraishi

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.