31 Nights o' Horror: IMMERSION

VR hotshots gather on an island to develop new tech and find that the place is haunted by a very nasty on-eyed ghost. The village has a bus service and school along with a very few other residents which renders it silent and eerie. One of the women in the team is there to seek the fate of her father who disappeared (in a prologue) when his virtual self ventured too close to a Shinto gate a few metres off the beach. A woman also met the same mysterious end on the same day. A local mystic confirms this and cautions the wizkids off. They're wizkids, though, and they track down the VR recordings of the two missing presumed dead people to see what they can find. This unleashes a further blurring of the space between the technology and the supernatural forces that threaten to get rid of everybody they can find.

I'm leaving details out and not just spoilers. This is the latest foray into the nature of memory and place by J-Horror source-point Takashi Shimizu who brought us Ju-On (The Grudge) and all its descendants. While much of the flow of ideas and the confrontation between spirit and gigabyte can get detailed, he reins back the action to give us time to digest. That's necessary and for some it might make this a slow slog of a film. However, the patient will be rewarded with a low key and effective essay on the memory of folklore and locality, the the hard recorded recall of information systems. The two sides increasingly overlap and the notion of an inevitability to this, that they are attracting each other to form a potentially catalysmic union is where the scares of this horror story lie.

A few jump scares here and there approach tokenism and the vision of the waterlogged one-eyed ghost will appear unsurprising to anyone who has paid attention to J-Horror over the decades (including all the influenced cinema from other cultures). To me this is about using the iconography to explore the idea. We can feel comfortable in the familiarity of the ghoulish figure, so, when we see her interact with the reality blurring tech so that the lab's floorboards flood with seawater and people in underwater struggles glitch out of the scenes. One of the significant points revealed about the characters and how they plug into the world around them is a port of Kyoshi Kurosawa's terrifying Pulse which describes an apocalypse of isolation.

I've said very little about those characters and performances. They are all perfectly fine but they are at all times subject to the great fable, the two giants of human life - folklore to explain it and technology to enhance it - are the greater characters and, through a constantly stimulating visual environment we watch as their subjects interact. In the end we have a fulfilment ... of sorts and a meeting of potential ... of sorts. It's not a screamfest, it's a worry. That's why it works.

Viewing notes: I saw this as part of the Japanese Film Festival at the Kino in Melbourne. A terrific screening marred at the start by the oafs behind me who didn't understand that everyone could hear them murmuring and devauling the ticket price paid by everyone around them. For a short moment, it felt like they settled but a minute later the chief murmurer started up. I turned and looked straight at him long enough to make him shut up for the  rest of the running time. Gotta let these social troglodytes in on cinema etiquette.