Infection

Saw Infection, a fairly tame Japanese horror. It takes place in a hospital where a patient has been admitted who is turning into green goo. It begins fairly auspiciously, with a repeated motif of calls for help being ignored. An ambulance is calling for help, but the doctors turn the radio down. An elderly patient is found fallen out of bed. He claims to have called for help over and over. This is a fairly sinister place to start. Unfortunately, the film doesn't really go anywhere after that.

There's a lot of low-grade scares floating around. It's rated R but, honestly, you could show this film to most grade-school kids. There's fluids and a lot of needle horror, but not a single jump (thank goodness) but no real tension either. After the rhythms of the film are established, nothing is surprising. No anticipation or tension is built up and the result is fairly morbid but also sedate, almost mournful. Also, there's a lot of dead-end imagery.

Mirrors pop up all over the place, indicating illusion. This illusion undercurrent is reinforced by a boy in a kitsune mask and a discussion about how colors are recognized by our brains. In the mandatory Big Twist Ending, this kind of comes into play, but then there's this stupid double-fake-out "or is it?" ending which negates all of that imagery anyway. There's also a swing set that is shown ominously swinging as though ghosts were on it. This would be spooky but for the marked absence of spooky children (kitsune-boy is a patient and is often the horrified witness to scary events, not exactly a threatening figure.) What does a swing set have to do, thematically, with a killer disease? What could have been an interesting image is just confusing.

There's some kind of allegory that I thought I saw: the infection claims the doctors like an auto-immune disease, destroying the very mechanisms of defense against infection, but I think this is not actually in the film so much as just in my head. I think the film was sort of muddled but not terrible, not very good either, just... eh.