Marebito (2004) - Weird stuff from Asia - 9/10 (28/01/11)

This movie is a pleasant offering for any fan of Japanese cinema and weird mystery movies. I just gave this movie a try because I was attracted by the strange cover of a naked woman and a press text on the back that compared this movie to the works of Cronenberg and especially Lynch which I admire.

This movie is not as strange and difficult to follow as the works of a David Lynch, but it comes quite close and proves its uniqueness with a weird fantasy story and many original ideas that make you doubt what is reality or illusion in this movie as the frontier between both is a very small path. The movie lives by its strange and mysterious main character, by its dark and frightening scenes in the metro or in the strange apartment and by its idea that the main character films everything he sees. The dark footage, the minimalist dialogues and the atmospheric and frightening music create an intense and uneasy atmosphere like in a morbid horror movie plus the Lynchian weirdness and Japanese originality as well as a shot of intellectual or philosophical content. That's a highly explosive mixture even though it is a typical slow paced flick like many in this genre. I really suggest you to watch this flick if my description already made you curious.

This is a dark tale of an isolated and frosty man that wants to discover such an intense emotion as deadly gripping fear after he has accidentally filmed the suicide of an unemployed in a metro station. The main character wants to live the same emotion, stops to take his pills against depression and goes out to look what could have frightened the suicidal man in the metro as he is convinced that the man has seen something frightening out there. In the depths of the metro, the main character discover a strange underworld where strange spider men or robots live as well as some beggars and the ghost of the suicidal guy. He later discovers a strange and abandoned city in between some mountains of madness where he meets a naked and pale girl that is imprisoned in a small cave by a chain. The main character liberated the girl and takes her home. But she is very strange as she doesn't speak a single work and refuses to eat or drink anything that her new friend wants to offer her. As the main actor then gets strange and menacing calls and is observed and followed by a hysterical lady that says that the strange girl was her daughter, the camera man realizes that a strange secret surrounds this wicked girl: she needs blood to live and forces her saviour to look for new carcasses if he doesn't want to fail his strange mission and get menaced by the strange calls.