Oct 052000
 
two reels

A small town in Japan is thrown into chaos by spirals.  Some people become obsessed with them, watching them until they find a suitable, spiral-related way to commit suicide.  Others seek to destroy anything connected to spirals, while still others begin to physically change into spiral shapes.  Kirie Goshima (Eriko Hatsune), a girl at the local high school, is frightened, but doesn’t know what to do.  Her boyfriend, Shuichi Saito (Fhi Fan), whose father was one of the first to be affected, says the town is cursed and they must leave to survive.

I often complain that a majority of films are doing nothing new, that they lack originality.  Well, here’s a movie that is like no other.  It is completely original.  However, discarding plot, theme, and sense wasn’t what I had in mind.  Uzumaki is a drug trip without the need for drugs.  To say that it is weird is an understatement.

You may note that my synopses above doesn’t say what the characters do, only what is done to them.  That’s because they don’t do anything.  There are no protagonists.  Kirie and Shuichi exist in the story; they do not move it along.  Kirie, a weak and completely useless girl, does occasionally faint, but I hesitate to call that an action.  Shuichi seems on the verge of doing something for much of the picture, but then he doesn’t.

So, what does happen?  People watch spirals.  People make spirals.  People turn into giant snails.  Why?  Who knows.  A reporter, who almost does things, starts to dig into the past, but it doesn’t lead to anything.  No answers are given.  The story is being told by Kirie, but there’s no way to even guess where she is, or who she’s with.

However, for being incoherent, it isn’t bad.  It has a tone (also inconsistent), that is somewhere between camp and creepy.  The manga (Japanese graphic novel) that the film is based on goes for frights, but the film is more interested in mild tension.  For the first half, with the wild expressions and general overacting of the actors, and the deep evil just being spirals, I felt I was watching a horror film made for young children.  I changed my mind once someone cut off the skin on their fingers (fingerprints have spirals in them).  The gore is brief, as are most of the unsettling, but enjoyable deaths.  Many of the transformation are amusing.  Who doesn’t want to see a giant snail-man?

It isn’t uncommon in Japanese horror, particularly since the success of Ringu, to leave the viewer without an explanation.  Why does the evil exist?  How did it come into being?  What are the rules?  These questions are often brushed aside in favor of atmosphere.  And that works in films like Ju-on, but here, with less to shock, it doesn’t.  Perhaps if the characters had been more engaging I could have been pulled into the story to feel the uncertainty that they did.  Instead, I wanted some kind of answer and some kind of conclusion, and got neither.