AKA: Shi no Otome
Country and Year: Japan (2005)
Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Starring: Miki Nakatani, Etsushi Toyokawa

Review By: David Austin
Rating: 2 out of 4 stars (average)

Kiyoshi Kurosawa is putting us on. Screwing around. Having a laugh. It’s not at the audience’s expense – there are enough hints throughout his latest thriller, Loft, to gradually let the audience in on the joke. At the screening I attended, at first there were a few titters, then a full-blown chuckle, and, by the end, giggling was rampant.

Loft (the original Japanese translates more aptly into something along the lines of “The Dead Maiden”), a yarn filled with ghosts and mummies, starts off earnestly enough and, unlike Doppelganger, sustains at least an intermittently serious tone. The problem with Loft is that Kurosawa is starting to spin his wheels. His heart is no longer in J-Horror. Always more of an explicitly intellectual filmmaker than his genre colleagues Hideo Nakata (Ring, Chaos) and Takashi Shimizu (Ju-on: The Grudge), Kurosawa has specialized in the existential, supernatural thriller, gaining international attention with the brooding Cure and Charisma. Kurosawa’s career in horror reached its apogee with the brilliant, apocalyptic Kairo (aka Pulse), a masterpiece of mood, isolation and existentialist dread. His next film, Bright Future, eased out of genre and into new territory, successfully transferring his mood, themes and techniques into a more explicit critique of modern society as a whole.

Since then, Kurosawa has unfortunately seemed to be moving backward. With Doppelganger, and to a lesser extent, with this film, Kurosawa has blended the slapstick techniques of his earlier efforts in low budget direct-to-video cinema like Suit Yourself or Shoot Yourself: The Hero aka Katte ni shiyagare! Eiyû-keikaku (which felt more like a Sabu film than a Kurosawa piece), with the atmospheric horror of his Cure/Séance/Kairo days. The results have been mixed. Doppelganger started off as a straight existential horror film, and veered wildly into full-blown comedy mode at the 1/3rd mark. It’s a clever movie, and has its good moments (many of them), but never approaches the heights of Kairo and Bright Future. Unfortunately, Loft continues this trend. (Click Here To Read More…)