this is the MOST overamplified possible version of the james wan school/subgenre, and i am HERE for it. like hereditary, this seems to be part of a growing a wave of totally MAXIMALIST, utterly hysterical horror, reacting against the slowcore doom of the early 2010s.
everything louder than everything else!!!
despite their characteristic jump scares, most of the james wan school stuff i've seen is fairly sedate/expectable in terms of trope and genre (not that that is bad!).
but The…
im only posting this because now i am SCARED and i live alone. so someone please help. but i don't mean that in an i am actually a ghost and this review isn't real kind of way. this review is not haunted and you are also not being haunted. at least by me. currently. anyway, i have been scared by this film.
Sixty in September: 10/60
There are so many things to be fascinated by in this beautiful, wild movie, but two things really stick out to me. Obayashi talks about them in the interview on the Criterion materials:
One is the war and the atomic bombings. Obayashi is originally from Hiroshima. He says, quietly and candidly, that most his friends didn't survive the bombings, as a child. The second is Obayashi's sense of how children view and experience the world. He…
Ana's spectral screams as she flows and dances like a ghoul in the subway. All I could do was cry at it, with her, for her. Some freeing thing and all the bindings too coming up as blood and spit. Woman spirit birthed up from the grave womb of the earth.
There are doppelgangers and spies and the shadow of the Wall and monsters and eyes. The man with pink socks. And it is so profoundly sad. It's…
