Director: Hiroshi Takahashi
Year: 2024
Country: Japan
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Supernatural
Plot:
Working on a new project, a writer planning on doing an adaptation of a local story involving a woman who disappeared into thin air without a trace moves into her old villa with her friend for inspiration, but the more they stay there they become disturbed by the haunting visions of past tragedies.
Review:
This was a pretty disappointing and underwhelming feature. Among the brighter features here is the serviceable enough storyline that seems geared for a somewhat engrossing mystery that’s employed throughout here. The central idea of the writer and her friend arriving at the house out in the middle of nowhere and trying to utilize their skillset to explore a mystery about a former resident who mysteriously disappeared offers a fantastic starting point for this type of feature. This offers not just a reasonable enough explanation for what types of visions and hallucinations are typically on display here but also showcases the somewhat enjoyable scenes where the pair reenact the story to the point where they become haunted during the sequences which is a rather fun time here alongside the surviving footage of the encounter which becomes the basis for their interactions.
Outside of this, though, the central problem here is that it’s just plain bland and boring. The focus on going for the mystery approach and the two of them forcing themselves into makeshift detectives to solve it so that they have a sense of where to take their adaptation of the incident ultimately shows them to be weak and uninspired detectives going through the motions as weakly as possible. Given that there are no genuine scares or hauntings until the very end as the drama/mystery setup solving everything is the main focus leaves large portions of the film to be nothing more than them going back and forth talking things out which is fine at first but ultimately grows tiresome the longer it goes on. This is again fixed in the finale when the film gets a bit more creepy and unnerving but it’s not enough to hold it up.
Overview: **/5
A generally watchable if problematic genre effort, there’s enough to like here that it comes off rather well for what it is although the flaws do manage to bring it down in the end. Give it a shot if you’re a fan of this type of feature or are fans of the creative crew while most others out there should heed caution with this one.
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