Tormented

 

Tormented (2011)

Dir. Takashi Shimizu

Written by Sotaro Hayashi, Daisuke Hosaka, Takashi Shimizu

Starring Hikari Mitsushima, Takeru Shibuya, Teruyuki Kagawa

 

 

TORMENTED is a movie in which a giant rabbit mascot who lives in a metaphysical amusement park (or possibly the vengeance-minded specter of an actual murdered bunny, or possibly a haunted rabbit doll possessed by a standard-issue long-haired female ghost), torments (hey! the title!) a young woman who was struck dumb after a trauma involving her rabbit-killing baby brother and must unravel the mystery of this haunting despite the checked-out negligence of her flakey dad, who spends all day creating meticulous pop-up books dramatizing Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid. Sure, that’s the oldest plot in the book, but have you seen it in 3-D, smart guy? Because now I have.

 

But where are my manners? Welcome, loyal reader, to yet another year of Chainsawnukah, that magical time of year when I am contractually obligated to publish more than one review per month, and about something you might actually be interested in, as opposed to GONE WITH THE WIND or whatever. But this year there’s a twist: after eight years of doggedly pursuing long-form reviews at the cost of my very sanity, this year I’ve finally admitted to myself that although I can write 5,000 words about even the most blatantly empty bit of miserable horror garbage (see: FAMILY BLOOD, THE BLOOD BEAST TERROR, etc) that doesn’t mean I necessarily should. So if you really are a completist who must absolutely have a review of every horror movie I watch in the month of October, you can follow along on my letterboxd account where you can get some shorter, bite-sized reviews of the same garbage I’ll be expounding upon here in the kind of excruciating detail you’ve come to expect.

 

So, with that little bit of business in mind, let’s check back in on our weird rabbit haunting already in progress. Where was the deal with that?

 

Oh right, it’s a Japanese horror film, so I have no idea. It’s just gonna be fucking weird, and it’s not the kind of thing you’re entitled to answers about. But still, TORMENTED (Japanese title: ラビット・ホラー３Ｄ; “Rabbit Horror 3D”) gives the worrisome sense that there’s some kind of method to the madness. I mean, just try and untangle all that juicy symbolism in the first paragraph! Rabbits! Costumes! Mute siblings! Carousels (I didn’t mention that one before, so no shame if you haven’t yet untangled it)! Hand-crafted pop-up books! Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid! Frayed familial ties! Here is, by God, a movie trying to do a thing.

 

  What that thing is, specifically, I’ll save for the spoiler section below, but suffice to say that the curious part is not the thing itself, but that it is very intrinsically tied to the plot. This is a movie that is going somewhere, and not just to some room where a ghost crawls down the stairs and gurgles at you. Somewhere narratively. That strikes me as unusual for Japanese horror. Western-descended horror tends, especially in the past few decades, to be structured as a mystery, with the inherent narrative drive and implication of a paradigm-shifting twist that comes part and parcel with that structure. It’s a very story-driven medium. Japanese horror, by contrast, seems largely disinterested in narrative, with the plot (or, more often, simple scenario) serving more as an unobtrusive framework for atmosphere and surreal setpieces than an ends in itself. This is, of course, a very broad generalization, and it’s easy enough to think of exceptions on both sides of the Pacific. But the fact that you have to think of exceptions tends to prove the rule, I think, and TORMENTED is a case in point.

 

It is noteworthy, then, that the movie is very fussily structured to foreground a significant, paradigm-altering twist. The kind of twist, in fact, that could fairly be defined by that most loaded descriptor, the mindfuck. I wrote about this phenomenon fairly extensively a few years back, and consequently I do not expect you will be particularly shocked to discover this is not one of those rare mindfucks which blows your mind and retroactively enriches everything that came before. It is of the much more common variety, the kind that make you say “surely they aren’t going to…” and then “are you fucking serious?” after which any hope of enjoying the plot on anything other than an ironic level is definitively squelched.

 

The good news, though, is that despite being an unusually plotty movie by Japanese standards, and particularly the standards of Takashi Shimizu, the singled-minded auteur behind the remorseless death march of JU-ON / GRUDGE movies, which take blithe plotlessness to near-absurdist levels over the course of their punishing and inexplicable now-13-movie run (yes, you read that right; they actually added another GRUDGE remake since I last wrote about this, and that doesn’t even count the new Netflix series that I’m currently suffering through),* the movie doesn’t live or die on its narrative. There are other things to enjoy about TORMENTED that manage to survive the rapidly deteriorating plotline mostly intact. Much of that has to do with the film’s visuals; despite the presence of yet another long-haired female ghost, it’s a much more colorful film than nearly anything else in Shimizu’s oeuvre, both in terms of incident, and, more literally, in terms of cinematography. 

 

For that we can thank ace cinematographer Christopher Doyle, an Australian expat and renaissance man who has worked with Wong Kar-Wai, Jim Jarmusch, Zhang Yimou, Gus Van Sant, and Alejandro Jodorowsky, among others, in a long and decorated career. With the arguable exception of Takashi Kitano regular Katsumi Yanagishima (who shot THE GRUDGE 2), Doyle is the only “marquee” cinematographer to work with Shimizu, and to my knowledge the most prominent cinematographer to ever shoot a J-horror film. The result is something infinitely more visually compelling than anything else I’ve ever seen from Shimizu, and, in fact, the vast majority of the horror genre. Doyle is not entirely able overcome Shimizu's fetishistic love of cramped, dingy interiors, but for a few sequences, particularly a surreal carnival and an impossibly long spiral staircase, the film looks fuckin' great. He also makes some smart choices with the 3-D; just two years after AVATAR inaugurated America’s brief and intense love affair with, then backlash against, then final resigned acceptance of the medium of 3-D, Doyle seems to have intuitively grasped how to get the most out of the technique (which was then –and still is, to some degree-- widely regarded as a gimmick).

 

He ably manages some of the now-standard tricks (still particle effects, which always look baller in 3-D, and plenty of deep-focus, multi-planed shots), but is also bold enough to play with the medium a little. One of the most interesting experiments comes from adding a filter of digital video-noise over the 3-D footage in a few sequences, which results in the odd effect of imposing a flat barrier between the viewer and the 3-D world behind the “veil”. I'm not sure quite what he was going for here, but it creates an odd, artificial sensation, highlighting the unbridgeable gap between the audience and the fictional characters in the movie by making the usually invisible demarcating boundary --the screen-- suddenly and ostentatiously visible. The filter thus becomes part of the image and yet distinct from it, operating on a completely different plain which exists only on a meta level, part of our experience of watching but not the experience of the characters.

 

If the rest of the movie was as vivid and imaginative as the cinematography, we’d really have something here. Alas, most of it is content to recycle the standard bag of J-horror long-haired-female-ghost tricks (already pretty well played out through repetition in the decade since JU-ON and RINGU inaugurated the “J-horror” movement) with little or no ambition or innovation. The rabbit mascot costume is an unusual and, I think, largely effective bit of unnerving surrealism, but it’s not actually as big a part of the movie as you might assume; meanwhile, there’s certainly no shortage of scenes where the long haired female ghost suddenly appears unexpectedly accompanied by a loud musical sting. So the genre content itself is a bit of a wash, which is why I am forced to turn again to, of all things, the plot. But this time I’m going to have to talk about it in a little more detail, so SPOILER WARNING.

 

 

 (SPOILERS) See, the movie does something that I’d almost be inclined to call daring, if it wasn’t also so stupid. It begins from the perspective of much-bullied little kid Daigo (Takeru Shibuya, ACE ATTORNY), who is experiencing some troubling haunting-like occurrences. Daigo is the younger brother of the mute Kiriko (Hikari Mitsushima, LOVE EXPOSURE, DEATH NOTE [2006]), and she is getting extremely concerned that her brother’s “bad dreams” about a sinister rabbit mascot and a spooky ghost woman may be more than just dreams. Eventually, after much standard haunting nonsense, something jogs Kiriko’s memory and she realizes that this may have something to do with her stepmother, Daigo’s biological mother, who she unintentionally killed in a bratty fit of rage as a youngster. Wouldn’t you know it, she had forgotten all about that, but yeah, that’s a promising lead. You never want to get too cocky about your little theories, but it’s probably a hint that the dead woman was wearing a bunny mascot suit when she died. Seems like a possible clue, right there.

 

(SPOILERS CONTINUE) So far, so standard for this kind of hooey. Fine, now we know who the ghost is. But then right at the turn of the final act, something else jogs her memory a little more and she remembers something else arguably even more relevant: there never was a Daigo in the first place. It seems that stepmom died pregnant, and ever since then Kiriko has been hallucinating an imaginary brother. In fact, she’s already been sent to a mental institution about it once before, now that she thinks about it. Despite half the movie taking place from "Daigo's" perspective, there apparently never was such a person.

 

(SPOILERS CONTINUE) Which raises the important question of what the fuck did we just watch? Half the damn movie up til this point has been Daigo’s dreams, and now we’re being told he never existed in the first place? What were we even seeing? Was that stuff, like, a dramatic reenactment of things that Kiriko imagined that her imaginary brother was experiencing while she was asleep?! Indeed, even Kiriko seems to have some confusion about how, exactly, this is supposed to work, because she rushes back home to check out why the fuck she’s been sleeping on the lower part of a bunk bed if her dad never had a second child, and sure enough, wow, it’s just a single bed, no bunk at all! Guess she was also hallucinating some furniture and stuff. They don’t mention it, but surely she would have wondered why he didn’t have a toothbrush, so presumably every time she’s brushed her teeth for years, she has been hallucinating a nonexistent second toothbrush in the bathroom while she does it. And we see her doing the laundry, too, so one can only assume she’s been doing imaginary loads of laundry all this time, or at least running a bunch of half-full loads thinking there were a bunch of imaginary little boy clothes in there. Probably wasted a lot of water washing imaginary clothes, dirty dishes, hallucinated bedsheets, etc. Bad for the environment. One more thing these fiendish ghosts have to answer for.

 

 (SPOILERS CONTINUE) But wait, there’s more! That would already be the dumbest twist in the world, but TORMENTED isn’t finished yet. In fact, there’s still an entire act left! You see, even though Daigo is not, and has not ever been real, suddenly he shows up again! And now he’s a bad guy! I can only assume the never-born spirit has now somehow manifested itself based on Kiriko’s imagined version of him (or maybe he was a vengeful ghost all along, and he was just pretending to be her loving, troubled brother for years to fuck with her? If so, way to play the long game, little dude). I’m genuinely not sure if there actually was a ghost in the first half of the movie, or if Kiriko was just hallucinating a nonexistant ghost to haunt her nonexistant brother, but either way, now there definitely is a ghost, and Dad can see him too, and he’s not gonna stop til everyone gets some emotional closure about the unfortunate death of the woman who would have been his mother. Or, that failing, falls off a high ledge and dies, that would work too. Shortly before the end, though, Kiriko regains her lost ability to speak, and Shimizu seems absolutely certain this is deeply meaningful.

 

It’s not, and neither is anything else here, no matter how much jumbled symbolism Shimizu pours on. The movie falls solidly into the category of “takes itself way too seriously to get away with being so fantastically stupid.” But at least it’s nutty and intermittently colorful. That's more than you can say about a single JU-ON, and TORMENTED graciously doesn't have 13 sequels and remakes you're doomed to suffer through. Besides, in what other movie are you going to get a gigantic 3-D, anthropomorphized rabbit gesturing mournfully at a tree full of other hanged mascots? Japan has made a lot of movies, so the possibility that there is another one cannot be ruled out, but at the very least I'm reasonably confident there are not more than, say, a half-dozen, so that's still rare enough to be valuable. For a director as repetitive as Shimizu, it's positively eccentric, and he really seems to be letting his hair down and having some fun. There’s even a bit of odd meta tomfoolery, where our heroes go see Shimizu’s previous 3-D movie SHOCK LABYRINTH and --lo and behold!-- a 3-D rabbit doll comes out of the screen and materially influences the plot of this movie. There’s enough good stuff here, and enough wanton, unhinged ambition that I wish TORMENTED was actually great, instead of just a weird disaster, but it’s certainly got a lot of personality for another long-haired-female-ghost J-horror movie, and the haunting, surreal visuals alone are enough to make it worth a watch for the horror aficionado who has some tolerance for absurd plotting. And reader, I hope to god you’re such a person, because if not, I’m definitely gonna lose some more longtime readers this month.

 

Plus, there are not too many horror movies about giant rabbit mascots, so another one is always welcome. Bring on TORMENTED vs FOOD FIGHT!

* Of which Shimizu himself personally directed six (plus the two short films which inspired the series)!

 

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2020 CHECKLIST!

The Man Who Queue Too Much

 

TAGLINE	None
TITLE ACCURACY	I guess there’s some tormenting going on, but I prefer the more literal Japanese title “Rabbit Horror 3-D”
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	No
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	Japan
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Ghosts, J-Horror, Surreal Horror
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	I don’t know how beloved Shimizu is, but anyone who started a series that reaches 13 entries is obviously reaching some kinda audience.
NUDITY?	None, from what I’ve seen Shimizu’s movies are all fretfully, insistently sexless.
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	None
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	A rabbit is attacked, and a giant anthropomorphized rabbit is clearly up to no good.
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	Yes
POSSESSION?	No
CREEPY DOLLS?	A very cursed rabbit doll
EVIL CULT?	None
MADNESS?	Only if you consider hallucinating a younger brother for years, and then forgetting that you did that, to be in any way mentally unstable
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	Yes, rabbit mascot into flesh-and-blood rabbit
VOYEURISM?	None
MORAL OF THE STORY	That most universal of all lessons, never hallucinate a family member and then hallucinate that they are haunted on top of that. It seems appealing, I know, but it ends badly.