With a nubile female vampire, a sci-fi subplot, and a critique of today’s surveillance society, how could the director of Ju-on go wrong? For starters, by piling on layers of digital video, meditating further on guilt and prescription drugs, allegorically casting Tetsuo auteur Shinya Tsukamoto, and filming the whole thing in eight days. Takashi Shimizu’s busy puzzle follows a TV cameraman as he investigates an urban legend in the Tokyo subway. After quitting Prozac, the neurotic happens upon a naked young woman whom he brings home and tries to fashion first into a Kaspar Hauser and then into his pet. Along the way Shimizu introduces a host of promising themes, all of which he either discards or interrupts with absurd horror conventions. Like its protagonist, Marebito suffers from an identity crisis: it neither musters the campy horror of Ju-on nor follows through on its art-house potential.
