Review: THE FORBIDDEN PLAY

Young Haruto tries growing a lizard from a jettisoned tail on his father's playful advice and it works. Naoto, his father, is improving the house he's just bound himself to by mortgage by making the garden workable for his wife Miyuki who smiles at the gesture before cuddling up to him and saying, "don't betray me again". That's because young up and coming documentarian Hiroko used to work in the same Tokyo salaryman pit where she was cornered by her horny boss but saved by Naoto who is considered unfaithful by Miyuki who shows that she can summon terrifying wraiths to torment anyone who troubles her. Then, there's an accident which claims Miyuki's life and leaves her son in a weird state. He pinches one of her corpse's fingertips to plant in the garden. Well, it worked for the lizard tail. All good? Great, strap in, there's more.

But that's all the plot you'll need for this review as it just keeps piling the supernatural tropes on until saturation if achieved somewhere in the second act. Is that so bad for a supernatural horror movie? Not at all, the reason we call them genre is that we expect things of them, sometimes to fine detail.The problem here, if there is one, is that this is not just the latest assembly line unit hammered out by the James Wan stable of ghost train boo-scares, it's the latest feature film from the man who can be said to have founded the still heavily influential J-Horror sub-genre. (I'm not getting into any bullshit discussions on the bounds of J-Horror as its prime examples from the late '90s to the early '00s are clearly identifiable and only slightly related to what came before and since. I hate the contention as much as the equal bullshit one of when punk rock started.) Hideo Nakata's Ringu is still the gold standard of J-Horror and here he is really just repeating something he's already done. If it was just this film, there wouldn't have been a J-Horror.

That's not to say it's bad. Yes, there are frequent overstated performances and we get information in dialogue that both we and the characters ought to know by then and the third act is a playing out rather than an explosive revelation, but, really, those are the kind of things that sell the tickets. I bought my own in absence of any fantasy that Nakata was going to pull another gamechanger from the ether, I knew what I was in for. Every box is ticked and then some (that wraith is scary) but ...

Well, put it this way: think of your favourite musical act. Now, imagine them taking a hard left, a massive and possibly suicidal swerve away from what you're used to. What do you think of them, now? Well, you've still got all the good stuff from before, so sit this one out and wait to see if they come to their senses for the next one. Apart from a tiny group in their fandom set, most will think this way. Lou Reed had one Metal Machine Music but then got back to songs and a refreshed career. In the '90s, Harry Connick Jr charmed millions with his retro crooner schtick but then killed all that off with one album of indigestible funk. Michael Buble started the same way but took baby steps and still keeps the wolves away. 

So, do we saddle Hideo Nakata with being the guy who made Ringu and started J-horror. Shouldn't we rejoice that he brings out cover versions of his own work which can never have the impact of the first few? Well, he tried. But he tried oddly. He made the sequel to the US travesty The Ring and it was bleh. He remade the Pang Brothers' masterful The Eye but, like The Ring 2, it just ended up as a conventional American horror. The later Chatroom was promising, abandoning the J-Horror tropes altogether and trying something out (it's worth a track-down, actually). So, he went west and swilled around with big American money with real effects budgets and guaranteed wider distribution; give the guy a break.

Well, I would except that the guy began with a lot. Just before Ringu came a taut erotic thriller Chaos which slashed at the time line as well as kept everyone guessing. Ringu started a seismic shift. And then, the effortlessly finer and deeper Dark Water. He wasn't just a good film tradie, he had vision and cinematic poetry. I don't begrudge anyone for chasing the good life even if it means letting their standards down, but it bothers me that when they try to spell the old magic they make flat cover versions of their own genius.

The Forbidden Play is a perfectly entertaining piece but there are things impossible to ignore about it that go beyond Nakata repeating himself that bother me. Adding a comedic element in the psychic character and his samurai-like sidekick is quite well managed but feels more like Takeshi Miike and his pragmatically bizarre genre-bending. But it's worse, while the movie looks all '90s and stuff it starts taking on the look and feel of those James Wan horrors I mentioned before. It's the sight of an iconoclast learning from the hack that gets to me. Well, I've still got all the old albums.

The Forbidden Play is currently screening as part of the Japanese Film Festival.