Kyoshi Kurosawa's KAIRO review

[Aaron Gerow]

I'm afraid I was less thrilled by the film than others.  Intellectually, 
it is quite fascinating, and I featured it a lot in my essay on Japanese 
horror and repetition for the Pesaro Festival coming up, but for various 
reasons it doesn't have the visceral impact.  Part of the problem is the 
talento actors and the excessive music, but I also wondered whether 
Kurosawa, who is clearly citing his own Barren Illusion here more than 
Ring, was not quite sure how to insert the Barren Illusion world into the 
horror genre.  Filmmaker colleagues were also critical of the film.

Here's my review from the Daily Yomiuri.

*******
'Kairo' stumbles in its own vicious cycle 

By Aaron Gerow Special to The Daily Yomiuri 

KAIRO
Dir: Kiyoshi Kurosawa 
Cast: Haruhiko Kato, Kumiko Aso, Koyuki 

              One can be shocked at the number of Japanese horror films 
lurking on the silver screen. Ever since the phenomenal success of Ring, 
which reportedly will be remade in Hollywood, it is as if a new 
psycho-suspense flick is coming out every weekend. 

              Is this just because they are cheap and reliably 
successful? Or is the horror boom a reflection of deeper shifts in our 
society? Does the fact people want to be scared today say something about 
our world? 

              One can argue that the best of recent horror films, such as 
Kiyoshi Kurosawa's masterpiece Cure (1997), pointedly address our times. 

              That tale of an amnesiac mesmerist who made his victims 
commit murder said much about the constitution of the self and the burden 
of memory in our increasingly atomistic world. 

              Kurosawa's new film, Kairo, also appears consciously 
directed at contemporary life. Yet the degree to which it analyzes this 
existence also seems to be the degree to which it loses its impact as a 
horror film. 

              The premise is quite up-to-date. As Ring uses video, Kairo 
(which means "circuit" in Japanese) uses the contemporary technology of 
the Internet to introduce its monsters. 

              Ryosuke (Haruhiko Kato), a college student, and other 
Internet users have found their computers suddenly connecting to a Web 
site that invites them to access the dead. Those who get too curious end 
up sealing off a nearby room with red tape, inside of which they meet 
Death itself. It seems the world of the dead has finally found a portal 
to connect with the living, and that window is called the Internet. 

              What is eerie about this is that the dead don't attack from 
without and in a conclusive matter. Like the Web site itself, which 
merely begins by posing questions, the monsters here are unlike Ring's 
Sadako, randomly wreaking revenge on anyone, and luring, rather than 
attacking. In the end, it is the victims themselves who, perhaps out of 
some death wish, end up committing suicide. 

              Even a friend of Ryosuke's like Harue (Koyuki), who is 
trying to investigate the phenomenon, finds herself enticed by death 
despite Ryusuke's pronouncements on the value of living. Thus while the 
victims often take their own lives, it is as if they had already been 
dead long before, living in a state of limbo until they simply fade away. 

              The invasion of the dead is then less a full-scale assault 
than a gradual seepage from the vessel of life. Before one knows it, the 
world of the film is, with little fanfare, being depopulated, leaving 
Michi (Kumiko Aso), Ryosuke's last partner, as one of the last survivors, 
struggling to escape, but with no place to go. 

              What renders this film contemporary is not simply the 
Internet, but also the increasing awareness by those like Harue studying 
the problem, that maybe death is no different from life, but simply an 
endless repetition (another sense of "circuit") of this existence. 

              In this sense, Kurosawa's film is attuned to sociological 
work like that of Shinji Miyadai, who says contemporary Japanese youth 
feel their lives are merely "owari naki nichijo" (literally, everyday is 
the same), burdened with the ominous prospect that the dullness and 
unfulfillment of today's Japan will continue forever. Maybe we can say 
the willing victims in Kairo are then merely acknowledging that they've 
been dead from the point they began living. 

              The connection is intellectually fascinating, but in the 
end, Kairo doesn't quite work as a horror film. If it is an allegory 
about contemporary existence, it has more in common with Kurosawa's 
Barren Illusion than Cure. 

              The former film not only shares Kairo's depiction of an 
undramatic apocalypse, it evokes the barrenness of existence with 
characters who also fade out--though not necessarily in death. 

              Barren Illusion, however, is not a horror film and Kairo, 
while conceptually rich, does not have the viscerality of Cure or even of 
Kurosawa's more abstract tale of Armageddon, Charisma. Coupled with 
generally poor performances by such "tarento" actors as Kato, the movie 
does not have the impact to take its message home. 


Aaron Gerow
Associate Professor
International Student Center
Yokohama National University
79-1 Tokiwadai
Hodogaya-ku, Yokohama 240-8501
JAPAN
E-mail: gerow at ynu.ac.jp
Phone: 81-45-339-3170
Fax: 81-45-339-3171