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| Uzumaki |
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  (7/10)
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Runtime: 90 |
| Public Rating: 8.67 (3 votes) |
Director: Higuchinsky |
MPAA Rating:  |
| Genre: Horror/Mystery/Thriller |
Year: 2000 |
| Writer(s): Kengo Kaji, Takao Nitta, Chika Yasuo |
| Distributor: Koch Vision Entertainment |
| Reviewed by: Mel Valentin |
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Signs and portents. A sudden gust of wind on a calm, cool day. Pink clouds litter the afternoon sky, drifting, shifting, changing into corkscrews. Spirals, naturally occuring and man-made, appear with increasing regularity, signaling a slow, inexorable slide into a local apocalypse. Premonitions and mysterious, unexplained (and violent) deaths, bodies contorted into unnatural, impossible position. A town inexorably sinking under obsession, fear, and an invisible, supernatural menace.
Uzumaki, stylishly directed by the singularly named Higuchinsky and based on the popular manga (Japanese comic book) by Junji Ito, is best described as part art film and part supernatural horror. Borrowing tropes from European art cinema (and modernist fiction), Higuchinsky and his production team craft a uniquely hallucinatory, surreal vision, a fever dream masquerading as a conventional horror film. Uzumaki, however, also exhibits the peculiar Japanese tendency to jettison closure and logic in exchange for ambiguity and incoherence. Audiences expecting the traditional elements of storytelling, i.e., strong, active protagonists, dilemmas and complications, a linear, casually tight plot, and a final revelation that offers unambiguous answers to the issues raised by the plot, will be sorely disappointed.
Uzumaki is helpfully divided into three sections, “Premonition,” “Erosion,” and “Visitation.” “Premonition” introduces the audience to Kirie Goshima (Eriko Hatsune), a teenage inhabitant of a small Japanese town, Kurozucho, and the ostensible protagonist. The small cast of characters includes her childhood friend (and romantic interest), Shuichi Saito (Fhi Fan), Shuichi’s father, Toshio (Ren Osugi), Shuichi’s mother, Yukie (Keiko Takahashi), Kirie’s father, Yasuo (Taro Suwa), a potter. Kirie also has her very own teenaged stalker, Yamaguchi (Sadao Abe), who plays, at most, a tangential role in the film. Yamaguchi's decision to prove his worth to her, however, leads to increasingly erratic, potentially violent, behavior (capped by a gruesome denouement). Each character in turn will be directly or indirectly affected by the Lovecraftian curse spreading throughout the town.
The curse, seemingly without origin, affects Shuichi’s father first. As the film opens, Toshio is already under the influence of the “uzumaki” (translated as “spirals" in the subtitles, but a more accurate translation would be “vortex,” which suggests a gravity well, pulling objects and people into its center). Toshio has abandoned his normal routine, job and home, to collect any and all objects that contain a spiral pattern. Kirie first encounters him videotaping a snail vertically crawling on a fence. Toshio ignores her, immersed in observation and thought. His idiosyncratic behavior soon becomes problematic for his wife and son. Before Toshio can be institutionalized, however, Toshio commits suicide, videotaping his own death. Kirie, tasked to leave a spiral-shaped plated made by her father, discovers the body. Toshio, per local custom, is cremated. Bad idea. As Toshio’s body is cremated, a plume of gray-black smoke spreads from the crematorium's chimney, shaping itself into a spiral, drifting on the wind, eventually slipping into a nearby pond. Toshio’s mother understandably reacts badly to the plume of smoke. Her obsession runs counter to her husband’s (the sight of a spiral pattern sends her into hysterics).
Others in the town are and have been affected, including one of Kirie’s classmates, who appears at her classroom door, covered in slime, and moving (and speaking) slowly. Another student, seen only as a blur, falls from the school’s spiral staircase, an apparent victim of the “uzumaki” curse (a spiraling close-up reveals that he died with a smile on his face). On a lighter note, one of Kirie's vain and egotistical classmates expresses a desire to be noticed, to become the center of attention. She gets her wish, of course, but with unintended consequences.
Kirie and Shuichi, however, are relatively passive characters, ineffectual witnesses to the madness overtaking their families and their town, doing little except commenting on the unfolding events. In Kirie’s case, she functions as the character that accidentally uncovers evidence of the spiral madness (she also discovers Toshio’s body, a scene that occurs off screen, and therefore left to the viewer’s imagination). Their passivity is clearly evident with the introduction of a reporter character, Ichiro Tamura (Masami Horiuchi). Tamura’s investigation into the town’s history, the first and only attempt Higuchinsky makes at a rational explanation for the curse, is promptly (if memorably) halted.
Neither Kirie nor Shuichi make an attempt to follow Tamura’s lead. Instead, Kirie and Shuichi fall back into the pattern of discussing the film’s events, offering little interpretation or analysis, with Shuichi periodically suggesting they leave the cursed town. The characters’ passivity can be explained in several ways: as an inefficient, ineffective compression of the source material, a deliberate decision to reflect the manga’s loosely structured, episodic nature, with Kirie clearly coded as audience (or reader) stand-in, an observer, rather than a participant in the narrative’s unfolding events, or simply as a reflection of the curse’s deleterious effects on Kirie and Shuichi.
Whether taken as criticism or simply as an observation of Uzumaki's unconventional structure, Uzumaki unmistakably succeeds visually (and viscerally), in both individual shots and specific scenes. Whether it’s the placement of characters or objects in a shot (e.g., students standing passively, heads down, outside classrooms, Toshio sitting inside a roomful of spiral objects, Kirie’s nightmare vision) or camerawork and editing, For example, Kirie’s discovery of Toshio’s body occurs off screen, with the camera first following Kirie as she walks up to Shuichi’s house, then slowly tracks backward, allowing only the soundtrack to reveal Kirie’s awful discovery (Higuchinsky also adds a visual exclamation mark to end the scene).
In deciding to de-saturate the film stock, leaving green as the primary color (only Kirie’s red umbrella and jacket are allowed to disrupt the monochrome color scheme), Higuchinsky may have taken one step too far into artistic pretension. Presumably, in choosing a limited color palette, Higuchinsky strove to create a sense of defamiliarization for the audience, a world recognizably our own and yet not our own (in other words, the uncanny). The washed out color scheme, however, also undermines audience identification with the characters. The result: audience disengagement (with the characters’ on screen ennui mirrored by the audience's boredom). Uzumaki is undeniably flawed, and given its art-house pretensions, a film of limited appeal to mainstream or genre audiences, but its richly inventive visuals make Uzumaki (almost) essential viewing.
© Mel Valentin, 26th January, 2005
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