Popular reviews

• 

  Review by BRAT ★★★½ 5

  sometimes you are a little vampire girl having a chill time being naked and chained to a wall in the Mountains of Madness and a random guy picks you up and forces you to live in his apartment and drink his blood out of a baby bottle. we’ve all been there 🤷🏻‍♀️

• 

  Review by Ben ★★★★ 2

  Watching Shinya Tsukamoto carry a camera around, exploring the darkest corners of the world in pursuit of answers regarding fear and death is so satisfying. After a few Ju-on movies, I wasn't on the Takashi Shimizu train, as I found them to be mostly monotonous exercises that failed to sustain a chilling atmosphere. However, Marebito has me interested in continuing to work through his filmography. It's gripping from start to finish, primarily focusing on a flawed and unhinged character that's worth following if you're looking to be unsettled.

  I knew Takashi Shimizu could craft a good scare and send some chills down my spine, but I needed him to manage this sense of dread for longer than a brief moment…

• 

  Review by WraithApe ★★★½

  One of the weirder offerings from the dark continent of J-Horror that channels Lovecraft in a big way. We follow documentary maker, Masuoka, as he ventures into Tokyo's underground and records his explorations on a hand-held camera. There are a lot of ways this film could be read, from being entirely symbolic, literal or a mixture of the two. Depending on which way you go, the events that unfold would probably be more or less disturbing...

  The choice to shoot in digital will put some off, but it could have been a case of needs must, given Shimizu's fairly extreme budgetary constraints. In any case, I think it works - it further blurs the division between reality and fantasy; whether…

• 

  Review by Freyr ★★★★★ 10

  After watching Bilocation with a friend last night, we had a conversation about J-Horror and what films I would recommend to him. Marebito was the first to come to mind. So I broke out the DVD (one of the few I own anymore, and probably the first I've watched in at least 2 years) and we watched it. I've seen this several times before, but it's been long enough that it felt fresh in some areas.

  I simply adore this film (and thankfully he did too). It's a dense, ambitious piece of low budget film making, shot in a mere 8 days on a budget of about $40k, in between the filming of Ju-On: The Grudge and its American remake.…

• 

  Review by YI JIAN ★★★★ 1

  Fear of the dark, underground tunnels, faces peeking out right as you turn your back, fear of losing direction, of trespassing into the forbidden zone, of conspiracies, of being secretly watched by unseen forces, above ground there is acute fear of urban life, strangers, being consumed by severe loneliness in an overpopulated city, then there is the universal fear of pain, death, blood, yes, a lot of blood, the oozing sound that it makes forms the majority of the film, bottles after bottles of blood thrown in a blender filling the air with the smell of iron. It is as much about embracing fear as it is about escaping it. Great atmosphere, starring Shinya Tsukamoto (!!), shot in a mere…

• 

  Review by GoodBadMovies ★★★★ 9

  SHOCKTOBER #4

  Der freiberufliche Kameramann Masuoka (Shinya Tsukamoto) geht der Spur eines Suizides nach und entdeckt dabei ein unterirdisches Tunnelsystem unter der Stadt Tokio. Dort findet er bald ein großes Tal mit einer Felslandschaft und eine junge stumme Frau, die nackt an einen Felsen gekettet ist. Masuoko beschließt sie mit zu sich nach Hause zu nehmen. Doch die junge Frau, die Masuoko nur F nennt, wird immer schwächer, verhält sich merkwürdig, trinkt nicht, isst nicht und schläft fast den ganzen Tag. Masuoka muss bald feststellen, dass er sich in tiefe Abgründe bewegen muss, um ihr zu helfen...

  Mit "Marebito" liefert Regisseur Takashi Shimizu, der kurz zuvor durch "Yu-On" bekannt wurde, ein recht günstig produziertes, Lovecraft-inspiriertes, schauriges Mystery-Drama ab, dass nicht…

• 

  Review by pd187 ★★★ 1

  "among the images i captured were strange images that looked like ghosts or UFOs, things both strange and mysterious, but they mean nothing to me. probably because these things have already been defined as strange."

• 

  Review by Rachel 🧡💚💙

  You know when you forget how creepy some movies are cause they've sat on your shelf for years without a repeat viewing? That.

• 

  Review by Kevin Wight ★★½ 1

  The poster for this film is really quite misleading. It looks like standard lank-haired Japanese girl fare, and as it is from Takeshi Shimizu, the director of The Grudge that is probably a fair assumption.

  Instead Marebito is a strange concoction that takes us below the streets of Tokyo to catacombs that teem with the dead and other, stranger denizens. This is seen through the eyes and camera of Masuoka (Shinya Tsukamoto) as he seeks to discover the terror that he saw in the eyes of a man whom he witnessed commit suicide.

  Not only does it bear little relation to the standard J-Horror template, Marebito, in its willful strangeness and disregard for coherent narrative has more in common with…

• 

  Review by ✨ christie ✨ ★★★★

  wonderful film on video's simultaneous existence as an unknowable mirror and as something which can be used to make the unknowable presentable - if the camera never lies then surely what you are seeing through it must be truth, and if it is not truth then what means of seeing can you ever trust again? also posits the filming and voyeuristic exhibition of those considered Others, especially in a gendered sense, as a form of exertion of power by which one can shift the image to further subjugate the subject -- "by looking at her through the lens, i believe that i've salvaged her soul".

• 

  Review by 8 b i t m u r d e r b o t ∆ ∆ ★★★★ 9

  - 'The Stranger From Afar' is a special film to me. Masuoka (Shinya Tsukamoto) reminds me of... 'Me' in the early 2000's. I was an aspiring videographer and loved video editing with a passion. I spent quite a few years staring at life through a viewfinder. Nothing was HD yet, in my universe, but I was ready to push the limits. I wanted to go dark. Secret dreams of exquisite provocation. I wanted to dip my beak into the abyss.

  "Do I have the courage to open the door to the passageway of terror?"

  Masuoka wants to stare the essence of fear in the face and see how he holds up. Man's curious nature leading him down the spiral staircase…

• 

  Review by ALISTAIR LEACH ★★★★½ 2

  Considering the budget and the filming period, all things considered this is a low key masterpiece.

  A documentary filmmaker starts visiting secret caves under Tokyo and finds a female (vampire???) chained up, takes her home and he tries to domesticate her. Or if this is "reality", this is a really really really dark film about abuse and mental issue.

  I've never been a massive Shimizu fan and didn't like Ju-On, however this has given me the opinion to give him a second look, as this well up my street for horror films. It is smart and plays between Gothic horror and mental illness well.

  Well worth searching out.