Reincarnation

What distinguishes many of the best films--of any stripe or genre--from the rest of the pack is that they simultaneously keep faith in the possibilities of the medium and work within its tested parameters as a means to re-energize them. This point applies doubly to horror movies, which can often be particularly arduous to sit through when they're clearly coasting on autopilot and painting by numbers; naturally, any movie that feels bored with itself can't help but stimulate the same feeling (or, rather, lack of feeling) in an active viewer.

For myriad reasons, an uncommonly high number of Asian horror flicks succeed where their Hollywood or Western counterparts fall flat. This rule doesn't fly across the board, of course, but even a significant number of Asian horror offerings that might rank as "bad" qualitatively still manage to satisfy a certain cinephilic craving. And once you're hooked, that craving soon becomes something like an addiction--scanning the shelves of bootleg DVD shops in Chinatown for something, anything featuring, say, a ghost shadowing teenagers in Tokyo or a supernaturally-possessed psycho stalking victims in Seoul.

I should know. Thanks to none other than this blog's brilliant founder, I'm among the converted. (Thanks, Teresa. Without you, I would've never got all the tongue-in-cheek references in The Eye 10 or One Missed Call.)

Like many Asian horror efforts, Takashi Shimizu's Reincarnation is convoluted. And moody. And tangential. And enjoyable as hell.

While less exhiliratingly wacked-out than his earlier Marebito (a film Teresa reiterated for so long that I needed to see, and that I'm very glad I finally did), Reincarnation is at least as effective as Ju-On, the remade and sequel'd 2004 movie-cum-franchise that made Shimizu a household name among North American horror fans. It's also as structurally inspired, revolving around a twentysomething actress cast as a little girl in a film depicting a hotel mass murder.

Right, this is a meta horror movie, with some interesting things to say about filmmaking and, specifically, about the problems with re-staging traumatic past occurrences (if not necessarily about the cultural fascination with all things grisly and disturbing that endlessly encourages such films to be greenlit and churned out). Teresa perceptively compared Reincarnation to Inland Empire--both films about the complex process of performance, both evoking a somnambulistic state where the logic and sequence of events matters less than the tonal dynamics at play--and I completely agree, except that Shimizu thankfully skips the more yawn-inducing stretches of Lynch's epic.

Even when the plot loses you (and after viewing dozens of Asian horror films, I still find my head spinning, at times), the tension and creep-value of Shimizu's mise-en-scene remains admirably intact. Which is really saying something, I think--you're not quite sure why she's running into that hotel room, or who or what she's running from exactly, but you're heart's nevertheless beating nearly as fast as hers seems to be. This is why we watch movies.

Or, at any rate, why I can't resist watching Asian horror movies.