Kiyoshi Kurosawa is a difficult director to appreciate. His masterpiece CURE is one of my all-time favourite films, but everything else I’ve seen by him (SWEET HOME, LICENSE TO LIVE, SERPENT’S PATH, EYES OF THE SPIDER and CHARISMA) has very much failed to live up to the high expectations that CURE instilled in me for Kurosawa’s work. KAIRO has been touted as a return to form and I was very much looking forward to seeing it. The first hour or so of the film certainly does live up to the hype, but sadly it’s all downhill from there on, and it seriously overstays its welcome at almost two hours.

Michi, Junco and Yabe work at a rooftop garden centre. Their friend, Taguchi, has been working on a program for their business and hasn’t been in touch for a week. Michi decides to go and visit him to see what’s wrong. She knows where he keeps his key and so she can enter his apartment. However, there’s no sign of him. Michi looks round, and he suddenly appears behind a net curtain. He acts slightly strangely and disappears again whilst Michi is looking for the disk. She goes to look for him, and finds him hanging from a rope. The three discuss Taguchi’s suicide – “perhaps he just suddenly wanted to die. I get that way sometimes” opines Yabe. When they examine the disk, they find a strange photo of Taguchi’s apartment, in which can be seen a face reflected on something.

At home, Michi is feeling understandably upset. She’s watching TV when the image and sound start to break up, resulting in a fixed image of the TV presenter, minus his head. A bottle falls over without anything being near it.

A guy called Kawashima decides to connect to the internet. He doesn’t really know what he’s doing, but manages to connect to an ISP called ‘Uranus’. Suddenly the monitor displays a series of strange, hard to make out images of people in rooms. The message “Would you like to meet a ghost?” appears. Kawashima turns the PC off, spooked, and goes to sleep. When he awakens, his PC has started itself up and is again displaying strange images. He goes to a University PC lab where he tries to get info about the net from a student. He is overheard by a female lecturer, Harue, who tells him what to do if the site appears again (bookmark it, or press the ‘Print Screen’ key!)

Meanwhile, Yabe gets a call on his mobile. “Help” it repeats over and over. One of the strange images appears on the display. He goes to Taguchi’s apartment, and finds a strange mark on the wall where Taguchi hung himself. It seems to turn into Taguchi, but then fades back to the dirty mark. He enters a room that has been sealed in red tape (‘The Forbidden Room’), where he sees a strange ghostly woman.

Yabe turns up late for work the next day and is acting strangely. Kawashima’s PC starts up of its own accord again and he goes to find Harue, who comes back to his apartment to have a look at it.

From here on in, the film gets stranger and stranger, with some very odd ideas about the soul and the afterlife – apparently, there’s a finite capacity for souls in the afterlife, and when it gets full, they have no option but to spill over into this dimension (“When the Earth spits out the dead…”!) This transition can be achieved through certain rectangles marked out in red tape. When people die, they leave the strange black mark behind. PC’s all start to show weird images (the images being connected to the ghosts), and people begin to disappear. Exactly what all of this means, or what the last hour or so of the film is all about, I’m not exactly sure. Kurosawa seems to be trying to make a point about loneliness, and mankind’s reliance on technology which inevitably distances people from each other, but nothing is really explained and things get increasingly confusing towards the end.

However, it’s not all bad. Kurosawa’s direction is excellent, as are the lighting and cinematography (courtesy of the guy responsible for the look of RING). The mood and feel of CURE is very much revisited by Kurosawa here, with everything filmed in a very cold, clinical, detached way and hardly any close-ups. Parts of the film are genuinely spooky and the atmosphere of nameless dread that is evoked simply through the clever use of sound and glimpses of certain things will inevitably remind the viewer of CURE. There are some very impressive effects (a plane crashing into a building is particularly well done) and the climactic scenes of a deserted Tokyo are well done and very creepy.

However, the muddled script, overlong runtime and some poor acting by the leads all conspire to disappoint. Additionally, it felt as if Kurosawa was trying to draw on too many different sources – there were obvious similarities with the previous year’s AVALON (the central theme of alienation, the idea of a computer ‘ghost’), not to mention VIDEODROME (imagery and the idea of committing suicide after watching an image of yourself do it), LOST HIGHWAY (imagery, lighting, sound, use of video technology), RING (the look of the female ghost and the video images), and his own CURE (the marks on the walls, people committing suicide as if by auto-suggestion, etc.) These disparate influences don’t really gel and one is left with the feeling that Kurosawa didn’t really know what was going on himself by the end of the film. CURE took a similar approach, never really explaining anything properly and hinting at many different things, but it really seemed to work in that film; here, it just seems like it’s confusing for the sake of it.

With this film, I felt that the Kurosawa who made CURE was bubbling just below the surface, with the Kurosawa responsible for CHARISMA, etc. just to say clinging onto the helm. Hopefully, Kurosawa’s future projects will allow him to make another great film, but in the meantime he’s still one very interesting director, with a unique visual style.

KAIRO is available on Japanese DVD, with an English subtitles option. Rumour has it that a Region 3 HK DVD release is imminent.

Cast:

Haruhiko Kato: Kawashima
Kumiko Aso: Michi
Koyuki: Harue
Masatoshi Matsuo: Yabe
Kurume Arisaka: Junco

Crew:

Written & directed by: Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Executive producer: Yasuyoshi Tokuma
Producers: Shun Shimizu, Seihi Okuda, Ken Inoue, Atsuyuki Shimoda
Director of photography: Junichiro Hayashi
Lighting director: Meicho Tomiyama
Production designer: Tomoyuki Maruo
Sound: Makio Ika
Editor: Junichi Kikuchi
Music: Takefumi Haketa
Music producer: Toru Wada
Effects: Shuji Asano
Theme song by Cocco