On a Family Vacation…At a Quiet Resort…
Main Cast: Yuka, Kippei Shina
Director: Takashi Shimizu
Each year there are movies produced that are never seen by the public. Their content is considered too graphic, too disturbing, too shocking for general audiences. This is one of those films.
35 years ago, a mass murder took place in a hotel in Japan. Eleven people were killed, including a 6-year-old girl and her 10-year-old brother. Their father, the killer, filmed his killing spree and subsequent suicide. Now, director Matsumura (Kippei Shiina) is making a movie about the murders and casting for the roles. Even though Chisato Omori was only 6 in real life, Matsumura has cast a young adult woman, Nagisa Sugiura (Yuka), in the key role.
Nagisa is just getting her start in the business and is unsure what to expect on her first job. Whatever her expectations, I’m sure seeing a strange little girl in the background during rehearsals . . . and on the train . . . and possibly in her apartment, weren’t among them. Matsumura has pictures of all the original victims and Nagisa recognizes the girl from the crowd as Chisato, the character she’s playing in the movie.
Meanwhile, college student Yayoi Kinoshita (Karina) is studying reincarnation and beginning to recall dreams she used to have as a girl of a hotel she’d never been to but which further digging reveals to be the hotel at which those eleven murders took place.
As the story develops and Nigasa and Yayoi continue their own journeys toward the climax, the spirits of Kazuya Omori’s victims all begin to converge on the spot of their ancient tragedy, pulling all those involved in the horror along for a very unpleasant ride.
REINCARNATION is a curious little movie. It’s not particularly terrifying, but it is very effective and incredibly watchable.
Written and directed by Japanese horror maestro Takashi Shimizu, REINCARNATION was originally made as part of a J-Horror trilogy to which Shimizu had been asked to contribute. The differences between American horror and Japanese are obvious from the opening scene of any Japanese horror movie. I’m not going to expound here on the cultural differences and traditions , except to say that the bulk of Japanese horror movies I’ve seen are interested in telling deeply involved ghost stories full of vengeful spirits and unsuspecting victims. Most of them are good, they don’t usually go for the easy scare or the irrational resolution and ending but, for me, they’re just not that scary. Which is curious since I’ve often said ghost stories are the only truly frightening stories out there.
I wasn’t sure what to expect from REINCARNATION at all. I enjoyed Shimizu’s American remake of THE GRUDGE more than I did the original. And this movie surprised me, wasn’t like the others I’ve seen, and just furthered my trust in Shimizu as a filmmaker.
I did get confused in the middle, the Japanese names still baffle me sometimes and I had a hard time understanding at first that there were two different female leads and that their stories were about to intersect. But a second watch, paying closer attention and knowing how it all came out, cleared that up for me and I think I enjoyed the movie more the second time.
I don’t know how well REINCARNATION works as a horror movie–it’s not frightening, only mildly creepy here and there, and doesn’t really even feature any gore–but as an entertaining movie to watch sans genre, I think it works just fine. I will say REINCARNATION is one of the most stylish and well-shot of the 8 Films to Die For, definitely one of the ones I’ll watch again at some point. I just don’t know if I’d necessarily call it a “film to die for”, and, among the other 7 films in the series, it seems a little out of place.
More 8 Films to Die For
C. Dennis Moore is the author of over 60 published short stories and novellas in the speculative fiction genre. Most recent appearances are in the Dark Highlands 2, What Fears Become, Dead Bait 3 and Dark Highways anthologies. His novels are Revelations, and the Angel Hill stories, The Man in the Window, The Third Floor, and The Flip.
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