August 11, 2008
A lot of the widely raved about Japanese horror films are just not my thing. In some instances, I have to shut them off early because I get little out of it outside of a whole lot of gore. People call films like "Hostel" torture-porn, so I don't know what nasty name you want to g...( read more)ive to a film like "Suicide Club" or "Ichi the Killer". "Nightmare Detective", however, is refreshing in that it's gore isn't as extreme, disturbing, and violent as many other films. In fact, it's not much worse than what you'd see in an American horror film. In fact, this horror film doesn't resemble much else than an episode of CSI with a slight supernatural twist, however due to a solid director it's kept engaging and clever throughout.
The star of "Nightmare Detective" is Keiko (Japanese pop star Hitomi), who has been reassigned as a full fledged detective after simply having a desk job as a police analyst. She's not exactly socially equipt, and that's made abundantly clear with her lack of communication with her team. One of the men in particular calls her "princess" and doesn't care for her too much, nervously claiming that she'll one day be his boss. So, of course, the frail young attractive female needs to prove herself to those damn sexist men. Keiko's first case comes when two suspiciously brutal suicides are reported. The common thread linking the suicides is that both people placed a phone call to a man referred to as "0" (director Shinya Tsukamoto himself) shortly before their death.
Keiko soon looks for aid in Kagenuma (Ryuhei Matsuda), the nightmare detective who the film is named after. Kagenuma has the power to enter dreams and read people's minds. This gift is more of a curse as he see's the dark things lingering in peoples minds, such as when he sees a family worrying about nothing more than money after their father has passed on. Although he denies assisting the case at first, soon Keiko and Kagenuma become a full-fledged nightmare detectiving tag team! Yeah! This plot is way too familiar and it especially falls apart near the end, however some decent performances and strong social commentary make it very watchable.
"Nightmare Detective" is not your run-of-the-mill Japanese horror along the lines of Ringu or Ju-on. While it deals with the supernatural and contains several similar plot devices (the phone comes to mind immediately), Tsukamoto smartly dismisses these comparisons aside in one of the first scenes of the film. As we see Kagenamu entering a man's dream, we see the familiar long, black hair of a girl flowing down the side of a wall. This is treated as if it were a gag. Little things like that are absolutely necessary for a story like this as it keeps us engaged. While this isn't typical Japanese horror, this is typical detective thriller with a supernatural edge - so the audience demands a little bit more than what the plot offers on the surface. Tsukamoto delivers.
I didn't particularly care for Ryuhei Matsuda's performance as the nightmare detective. A lot of these films have your typical tortured badass, but Kagenuma was particularly uncharismatic and uninteresting. All his performance seemed to do was heighten Hitomi's even more, who has a very solid debut as an actress. Also, Shinya Tsukamoto manages to be especially creepy near the end.
While in a lot of ways this film was a pleasant surprise and very engaging, there were a lot of things here and there that really took away from my full enjoyment. For instance, I didn't like the "Evil Dead"-style first person shots in the nightmares. Although apparently invisible to the characters, we always knew exactly where it was. There's nothing scary about knowing what's behind the corner and where it's looking. A lot of the horror didn't work for me much, with only a few legitimately creepy moments coming in a large garage of bikes and near the end where Keiko was trapped in a small enclosure.
"Nightmare Detective" is "A Nightmare on Elm Street" meets every episode of CSI you've ever seen. That being said, the film aspired to get more out of it's genre and it successfully depicted typical urban alienation in a clever way. The film solidly makes it's point that we're all silently begging for a release and recognition, no matter what facade we decide to chose. It's about the horrors that lie in the undiscovered corners of the human mind. This isn't a great film by any stretch of the imagination, but I was certainly thoroughly entertained.
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