Madness is contagious in this new chiller from Ju-On’s Takashi Shimizu.

December 7, 2005 - The one thing most people will invariably remember about Takashi Shimizu’s Marebito is that the entire film was shot in a mere eight days. Shooting a ten-minute short film in eight days can be daunting enough, so Shimizu certainly deserves some respect for pulling off a full-length 90-minute feature in that same time frame. However, while the fact that Marebito was filmed entirely in a scant 192 hours is impressive, it’s also a double-edged sword. The rushed pace of the shooting causes Marebito to feel like a really disjointed affair-filled to the brim with great ideas that are never explored in any meaningful way as Shimizu spends more time relating things in voice-over narratives than actually exploring the mysteries so inherent in his images.

Cult film director Shinya Tsukamoto stars as Masuoka, an obsessed videophile living alone in Japan. When he’s not cooped up in his small apartment watching random video feeds on a bank of monitors, he’s out in the city with his camcorder in hand. Early in the film, Masuoka manages to record a man committing suicide in a subway tunnel. The man is oblivious to his surroundings and-with a look of pure unadulterated dread in his eyes-stares at something only he can see. Masuoka becomes obsessed with the idea of seeing something so terrifying that it shatters one’s sanity by simply looking at it-which leads him on the quest of the film.

This search for the ultimate in horror leads him to an underground world where he finds a young naked woman chained to a wall. Masouka takes her back to his apartment and christens her as "F". F can’t eat anything other than human blood, which Masuoka procures for her in a number of different ways. Meanwhile, he runs into an odd assortment of characters during his daily travels-including the guy who committed suicide in the subway, a woman claiming to be Masuoka’s wife, and a man with an electronically modified voice that we only hear on the other end of a telephone line. This is, quite simply, one weird little film. I haven’t even mentioned the Deros-some sort of destructive robot things that live underground in the cities beneath the cities...

What Shimizu has created is essentially the antithesis of his biggest hit—Ju-On: The Grudge, which makes it almost fitting that this film was shot immediately after he finished up the American remake. Whereas The Grudge was a fairly straightforward Japanese ghost story, Marebito is something entirely different-a bizarre amalgamation of the works of HP Lovecraft (Masuoka even mentions The Mountains of Madness at one point), Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, and Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom. These diverse and rich inspirations should coalesce into a unique tapestry of the surreal and macabre, but the final vision never quite comes together as Shimizu is far more interested in showing his audience endless shots of F drinking blood from baby bottles as opposed to tapping any of the rich narrative veins he’s opened up earlier.

This isn’t to say Marebito is a bad film-rather that it’s more a missed opportunity. Shimizu has a great idea and a fantastic performance from Shinya Tsukamoto (who’s absolutely fantastic at playing these creepy characters who dwell on the periphery of modern society), but can’t ever really decide what to do with it all. In many ways, this is a film that would have benefited from having Tsukamoto behind the camera-the story has all the earmarks of a project he would have directed himself.

Being that the film was shot in such a short time frame, the entire production was done on digital video. The decision to use DV is a good one as it adds immediacy to the narrative that would have been missing had they used traditional 35MM film. The camerawork is all handheld, meaning in spots it’s bouncy and occasionally hard to follow. The main camera’s picture quality is crystal clear, but Shimizu switches to a grainier and dirty image whenever the audience is supposed to be viewing something through Masuoka’s lense-again, this is a good decision aesthetically.

Finally, I must make note of the film’s soundtrack and audio elements, which are excellent. The score from Toshiyuki Takine is absolutely fantastic, mixing a perfect blend of ethereal music with the ambient noise of the city. Tsukamoto’s whispered asides meld nicely with the soundscape that Takine has created, all of which helps to give the audience a feeling of distinct discomfort throughout the film.

Ultimately, Marebito is an interesting, yet flawed, experience. It’s an odd piece of filmmaking that never divulges its secrets without a fight, but it’s also a giant missed opportunity in that could have been even more bizarre. There’s so much happening in this film that is intriguing but never explained. Had Shimizu taken the time to explore even one or two of the strange images and ideas that crop up in this film, it would easily be his finest work to date. Instead, it’s a weird film that works most of the time, but could have been so much more.