Seance (Korei) film review

THE STORY:

Junko works out of her home as a paranormal advisor while her husband Koji records sound for film and television. When a young girl is kidnapped, the desperate detective on the case reluctantly enlists Junko to locate the child. Unbeknownst to anyone, the girl has escaped her kidnapper and has hidden in one of Koji's sound equipment cases. When Junko locates the girl psychically right in her own garage, she and her husband decide to keep the child in the house for a short period for recovery, and so that they can hatch a hoax that will vindicate her alleged psychic gifts in the public eye. When events take a turn for the worst, they are haunted by ghosts real and imagined, driving the couple deeper into paranoia and an inevitable supernatural sentence for their crimes.

ROBERT L'S REVIEW:

In a perfect world, it'd only be a matter of time before the name Kiyoshi Kurosawa is as famous, at least in film circles, as his iconic (sur)namesake. Already the subject of a career retrospective at last year's TIFF and Toronto's Cinematheque, Kurosawa has been creating genre-bending, character-based puzzles since 1985 (with his debut "The Excitement Of The Do Re Mi Fa Girl"). His 1998 police procedural/hypnosis shocker, "Cure", remains one of the finest horror films of the last 10 years, IMHO.

"Vampires drink blood. Zombies eat flesh. My ghosts are very Japanese...they don't do anything."
Kiyoshi Kurosawa

If the synopsis of "Seance" sounds like that of a standard thriller, well...really it is. I was immediately reminded of the 1964 British drama "Seance On A Wet Afternoon" in superficial plot machinations and subdued tone, and found out later that Kurosawa and his cowriter based their film loosely on Mark McShane's original novel. Kurosawa's quiet, almost "ambient" approach to genre conventions is closer to the literary voice of Shirley Jackson than to the visceral kick of latter day American horror films, or even rival Japanese horror productions such as "Evil Dead Trap", or "The Ring" series. Absent is the roving Panaglide of John Carpenter, instead, we get a locked-down camera, wide, akin to the style of Ozu. Kurosawa's characters say little, as the plots advance, they seem less and less comfortable with each other, their surroundings, and finally, their own skins ("What Lies Beneath" indeed...).

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A nervous Kurosawa apologized at the screening, fearing his film wasn't scary enough for North American audiences: "Vampires drink blood. Zombies eat flesh. My ghosts are very Japanese...they don't do anything." True, the ghost of the dead child in "Seance" doesn't do much more than linger and accuse by her very presence, but as an image, she is as terrifying as the fleeting ghost from Nicholas Roeg's "Don't Look Now", or any latex monstrosity spawned from the lab of Dick Smith. Barely glimpsed in shadows as an ectoplasmic smudge, and even more frightening when she glides through a mid-afternoon diner crowd, missing facial detail and limbs, the diminutive phantom seems to taken apart and put back together for a mission in the corporeal world, but hasn't been assembled quite...right.

Imagery aside, "Seance" remains most compelling with its interior, domestic drama worthy of comparison to vintage Polanski. Is the psychic the real deal, or a charlatan? Does her concocting a kidnapping hoax for publicity negate her paranormal abilities? Are the husband's spiritual recordings just garbles, interpreted as something darker by his need to believe in his wife (at first, he seems to tolerate his wife's spiritist assemblies like he would a weekly bridge club) and absolve himself of his own guilt in participating in the hoax? The understated performances of Koji Yakusho (returning from "Cure") and Jun Fubuki render their characters sympathetic to the end...we become caught up in the couple's scam-gone-awry, hoping they'll undo the damage even as their actions become exponentially more desperate and grisly. Far from an ambiguous cop out, the film's gruesome climax will leave you satisfied and shaken but arguing with friends for days. What more can you ask of a movie, other than we get a chance to see it beyond a repertory house one-off or convention bootleg?

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Seance ("Korei")

TIFF [2000]

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