Youtube Festival / Reincarnation

[Jim Harper]

I too thought Rinne was interesting. It does have certain similarities with the Juon series, but he throws a few new ingredients into the mix. He juggles three parallel stories at once (including one in 16mm), making it pretty compulsive viewing. Shimizu's experience directing US movies has obviously rubbed off- his style here is a lot 'flashier' than his early V-cinema works, featuring some pretty good crane shots and a number of well-done dissolves. With the aforemnetioned Kurosawa cameo and an appearance by the ubiquitous Taro Suwa, I found it to be an entertaining effort. 'J-Horror' sceptics are unlikely to be convinced, however.
   
  Jim Harper.  
  
M Arnold <ma_iku at hotmail.com> wrote:
  In other news, there's a horror movie "festival" playing at several hundred 
theaters around the U.S. right now. (http://www.horrorfestonline.com/). The 
eight films in the festival are playing in rotation this weekend only (Nov. 
17-19). The series is being advertised as a group of movies that were "never 
seen by the public" until now because their content was too graphic and 
disturbing (yeah, right--at least two of them are already out on DVD). I 
noticed that Shimizu Takashi's 2005 film, Reincarnation (Rinne) was one of 
the selections, so I ran out to see it on Friday afternoon. I'm mentioning 
it here because Kurosawa Kiyoshi has a cameo as a college instructor in one 
scene.

Maybe it's all the Hitchcock theory I've been reading recently (or maybe I 
was just braindead after a busy week), but I thought Rinne was very 
interesting. The story is about a murder that happened 35 years ago when a 
husband and father of two killed his family and all of the people staying in 
a rural hotel (ala The Shining). A movie director in 2005 Japan decides to 
make a film about the killing, and during the casting process the lead 
actresses-to-be starts having hallucinations with little girls running 
around and nightmares about being in the hotel during the murders. She 
starts to think she's the reincarnation of the killer's daughter, and as the 
filming starts and her haunting continues she becomes convinced that she's 
going to be murdered by the father's ghost (whose spirit is most likely 
inhabiting the director). There's a nice twist at the end though. When the 
heroine wakes up from one of her nightmares, she discovers an 8mm camera 
left behind by the father. She hands the camera to her manager, who develops 
and watches the film. (Some of the footage reminded me of Stanley Kubrick's 
home movies in "A Life in Pictures.") Soon enough he realizes that the 
father even filmed his killing spree (ala Peeping Tom?), camera in one hand, 
knife in the other. Then we get to see what 'really' happened . . .

Michael Arnold 




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