|
Spiral
Uzumaki
review by KJ Doughton, 21 June 2002
28th Seattle International Film
Festival
If Salvador Dali, George Romero, and
David Lynch were car-pool buddies and their vehicle collided with a
vanload of LSD, the resulting hallucinatory splatterfest would only
begin to resemble Uzumaki (Spiral). The latest and
greatest in a celluloid sushi smorgasbord of recent Japanese horror
films, courtesy of such Nippon movie masters as Takashi Miike (Audition),
Ryuhei Kitamura (Versus), and Hideo Nakata (Dark Water),
Uzumaki takes such seemingly-innocuous images as a washing
machine, a snail, a pottery wheel, and a cantaloupe, and injects
them with the power of unpredictable dread.
Higunchinsky’s
surreal, dreamlike Uzumaki introduces us to Kirie (Eriko
Hatsune), a perky, precocious high school student aboard her bicycle
and en route to pick up stone-faced boyfriend Shuichi (Fhi Fan).
Almost immediately, the movie pushes round shapes and spiral
patterns through its haze of emerald-colored illumination (not since
Payback has a film been so saturated in greens and blues). We
see bicycle tires and whispy clouds that funnel into hypnotic,
circular forms, like algae-infested water being sucked down a slimy
sink drain.
It isn’t long
before such dark visual omens take on a more destructive, grotesque
form. Shuichi’s father appears to be going crazy, his eyes gyrating
in their sockets like Mexican jumping beans. Eventually, the
ill-fated man is taking videos of spiral snail shells, requesting
spiral ceramic pottery, and demanding spiral fish cake for dinner.
Shrewd Shiuchi has a hunch he knows what is ailing his old man,
stating, "This town is cursed by the spiral."
Soon, people are diving into
their washers to corkscrew themselves on spin cycle, and fending off
ear-infesting centipedes. Students are taking hair curling to
ridiculous extremes, and throwing themselves off of spiral
staircases, all under the life-threatening influence of this
circle-craving curse.
Amidst its
thrills and chills, Uzumaki demonstrates that Higunchinsky is
no one-trick pony. There’s an innovative scene that conveys the
sense of shuffling through pages of a photo album and reliving each
Kodak-captured memory, which couples freeze-frame shots with a
blurry transitional effect. There are also still-photo sequences
that bring to mind Night of the Living Dead’s unsettling
final images, with similarly chill-inducing effect. There is also
humor to be found in this gloppy nightmare gallery, such as an early
quote by one of Uzumaki’s overwhelmed characters. "My mind is
in a whirl," he observes, unaware of how prophetic the statement
really is.
Uzumaki is
a return to onscreen horror that results not from hip, winking,
Scream-inspired smarminess, or numbing, gory overkill, but from
the eeriest imagery this side of Eraserhead. Succumb to its
creepy charms, and you’ll never see inner-ear anatomy diagrams,
umbrellas, or escargot in quite the same way. You might even hand
over laundry chores to someone else.
Seattle International Film Festival
Coverage:
Reviews:
Interviews:
|
|
Directed
by:
Higuchinsky
Starring:
Eriko Hatsune
Fhi Fan
Ren Osugi
Hinako Saeki
Masami Horiuchi
Taro Suwa
Eun-Kyung Shin
Sadao Abe
Denden
Rated:
NR - Not Rated.
This film has not yet
been rated.
FULL
CREDITS
BUY
VIDEO
RENT
DVD
|
|
