For me, Tetsuya Nakashima is primarily famous for the fact that absolutely all his films are a real aesthetic pleasure. Usually he tells the story in a rather unusual manner, and the narrative in his paintings is built in a strange way, but the result is always something special and unforgettable.
This time, the director decided to try out horror films for the first time. Generally speaking, he succeeded, and I would like it not to be his last film in the genre.
At first glance, there is nothing special in the story. We've all seen it before. In fact, this is the simplest story about the paranormal, where the characters spend all two hours just running around in different locations in the hope of finding someone who will save them from this problem. In parallel with this, a stunning dramatic plot unfolds, and we continue to throw various topics for thought.
Have I seen a movie about the paranormal? Overall, yes. Was that what I was paying attention to in the first place? Definitely not.
The perfume doesn't scare me. Scare people and their actions. And all the characters turned out to be really worked out here and, despite some understatement, the story of each imagination draws itself. This is a story about what monsters sometimes hide behind happy masks, about what skeletons lie in the closets of a large number of people. A film about family conflicts. About how people consider themselves responsible enough to have children, but after a while they realize that it is not so simple and requires perseverance and patience. Perseverance and patience, which they do not really have.
And all this drama is diluted by the arrival of some otherworldly entity (here, obviously, is a metaphor for discord in family relations).
The picture is insanely beautiful. I was particularly impressed with the final scene. The combination of pink and blue here looks really charming. I wanted to literally stop every shot. I can’t say that this film was made as unusual as the other films of this director, but at least on the final stage it was completely dispersed and showed something really spectacular.
I don’t know how scary this movie is. Yes, there are attempts to scare the viewer here, and they are filmed quite spectacularly. At the same time, I don’t think that you can really get scared of this film and get what many people watch horror movies for. This is first of all a good drama, and in the second - a horror film.
As I said, all the characters turned out to be bright and memorable and the actors pretty well coped with their roles, although a certain percentage of replay is present here.
Of course, everything is not so cloudless, and I was able to highlight a few shortcomings:
Timekeeping. The film is unreasonably long. I think a lot of scenes could be cut quietly. The film would have benefited from this and become much more dynamic and exciting. I have to admit that what is happening already looks quite cheerful and does not make me bored.
The first half of the movie. It seems that the action begins almost from the first shots, but at the same time almost the entire first half of the film I was a little boring. I wanted action, I wanted development. And in general, the narrative is rather uneven. The film then looks simple ordinary horror, then sharply removed to some morality, then again returns to horror. And in the end, a lot of things happened. I didn’t feel like the movie was really long.
In general, this is definitely a breath of fresh air in the horror genre. The film left a lot of emotions behind and I can’t stop thinking about it for the second day. Tetsuya Nakashima can make me say, "Give me more." I have too little”. I can’t help but think I want to see something like this. I don’t think I’ll see anything like that.
Not the best film director, but very worthy. I hope that one day we will see another of his creations in this genre, because I am sure that he has something to show. I would like him to focus more strongly on trying to scare the viewer, so that what is happening can be fully fit into the horror genre, and not just called “a sharp social with paranormal in the background.” The first attempt of the director turned out to be confusing, but without a doubt deserves a positive assessment.
7 out of 10