Timid actress Nagisa Sugiura gets a lead role in a horror film that reenacts a mass murder. Years ago, a professor obsessed with reincarnation, killed the staff and guests of a hotel, including his own children. Nagisa has visions related to the horrendous event, and soon can’t tell the difference between the movie-shoot and the real killings. She isn’t alone, as others of roughly the same age also have visions of the past, and many of them disappear. Is Nagisa insane, or is she a reincarnated victim, fated, with the others, to repeat their deaths?
Takashi Shimizu (Ju-On 1 & 2, Tomie: Re-birth, Marebito, Ju-On: The Grudge, The Grudge), one of the creators and masters of J-horror takes time away from looting his Ju-On series to create something different, and demonstrates he’s still got it. Reincarnation is a tense, taut, supernatural thriller, that may not reach the heights of his best work, but shows there’s still life in Asian horror.
What hasn’t changed is Shimizu’s distain for linear storytelling. Any scene could be happening now in “reality” or thirty years ago. It could be a dream, a hallucination, a haunting, part of the movie they’re making, or a clip from an old 8mm reel documenting the original murders. Is that confusing? How about that any of those things can influence any of the others? We’ve got a direct connection (I’d say causal connection, but I have no reason to believe that Shimizu accepts causation) between a haunting and an event on the faux set. There’s a dream that finishes in something close to reality days later. Characters can walk from one reality to another, and often do. Don’t try to apply structured logic or a timeline, you’ll only hurt yourself.
After the dizzying plot, Reincarnation is most memorable for its characters. J-horror/K-horror doesn’t have a good record on creating believable or sympathetic personalities. Too often they’re distancing and unknown, which makes it hard to feel for their plight. Not this time. Nagisa is a real person, if a broken one, and I was caught up in her life. I empathized even more with the college student who had been dreaming for years of a strange hotel and unfortunately took this opportunity to find out what it means. Partly this is due to a script that gave the characters just enough to say, and just the right things, to turn them into people. Partly it’s due to camera work that catches the right moments, but a lot of the credit goes to actors, none of whom I’m familiar with.
What Reincarnation isn’t is Ju-On. It’s unsettling, not frightening. It’s thoughtful, not hysterical. There are no fountains of blood (OK, one little fountain) or babies in a sack. It builds slowly to a twenty minute brutal climax that’s thoroughly entertaining but won’t give you nightmares. Don’t expect to be shocked, but instead to be impressed, and you’ll have a good time.
Reincarnation was part of the advertising gimmick: After Dark Horrorfest, 8 Films to Die For. The idea was clever. Take a group of low budget horror films that otherwise wouldn’t get a theatrical release and package them as a horror event. All eight movies would play together for one week only. The commercials, which seemed to play every fifteen minutes on late night cable, promised horror too extreme for normal distribution. These were the most frightening, gore-soaked, shock flicks available anywhere. Of course that wasn’t true. Compared to the average R-rated work, the eight are rather tame. They vary from amateurish and boring to clever and joyfully creepy. Reincarnation is a strange fit. However, I’m pleased that it managed at least a brief stay in a theater on this side of the Pacific.