Sakebi

Saw Sakebi (AKA Retribution) It was a fairly low-key japanese horror. It's one of those police procedurals/ghost stories. It's creepy rather than outright scary, using Lynchian ominous rumbles and weird, deliberate visuals. The plot follows a police investigation of a woman's body sound in an empty lot, her head submerged in a puddle of seawater. Things get creepy when all signs point to the protagonist detective as the primary suspect. He finds a button from his coat on the scene and has vague and ominous dreams. Meanwhile earthquakes keep happening, threatening at any moment to obliterate the past, precious domain of ghost stories.

The fragile nature of the past is a central theme. Not only is the mysterious woman's body found in an empty lot but this empty lot is going to be a brand new condo development soon. The detective himself is playing his part in erasing the past and in re-killing the murder victim. When the ghosts show up, they are old friends.

The film is very gentle, using unease instead of shock. Until I picked up on the whole ghost = past symbolism, the story struck me as quite arbitrary. When it came out who the woman was and why the ghost was hanging around, it seemed completely ad-hoc to me. I mean, for example, there's a sanitarium introduced but it may as well have been a boarding-house, an abandoned jail, a hospital. Unless I missed it, there's nothing in the plot tying the ghost to mental illness. It's an interesting film in spite of its (seemingly) random plot. The ghost's visuals alone were worth the time for me. A sleepy little creepy movie.