Reincarnation
(Part of the  8 Films to Die For  Horrorfest)
(2006)
review by Died with Boots On

“Each year there are movies produced that are never seen by the public.  Their content is considered too graphic, too disturbing, and too shocking for general audiences.  Now, for the first time, one studio will defy the system to bring you eight movies you were never meant to see.  A terrifying event for horror fans across America.”  With a tagline like that, how could I say no?  ‘Reincarnation’ was the first of the ‘8 Films To Die For’ that I saw, and what a tough act to follow.  This psychological creep-out J-Horror is truly inspired.  I had Goosebumps for the entire hour-long drive home.

From the writer/director of ‘The Grudge’ and ‘The Grudge 2’ comes a film that is exactly what these two are not.  It is intelligent, bone chilling, well crafted, truly unsettling, original, and hard to watch at times.  It does not rely on cheap scares and, staying true to form, Takashi Shimizu is light on the gore and grizzle, with the exception of one scene that uses blood in excess.  Now, I hate the whole ‘Grudge/Ju-On’ franchise, but this flick, while it makes sense that it would have the director in common, is a much more clever and scary story.  I would even venture a guess that it was less expensive to make.  I recognized a few recycled props from his most recent ‘Grudge,’ and the rest of the setting was split between a warehouse and a hotel.

After a handful of unsettling macabre vignettes in which a girl sees a man behind her in the reflection of her cell phone, a man in an elevator becomes paralyzed with fear by someone standing behind him that was not there just a moment before, a truck driver runs over a bellhop walking disjointedly down the road and is preyed upon by sickly, shadow people when he looks under the cab of his truck at the mangled body, and a man’s face morphs momentarily into the face of another man while he looks at himself in a bathroom mirror.  Immediately before the opening credits, the camera cuts to a decaying hallway where a red ball is bouncing along the carpeting.  It knocks into one door in particular and pushes it open.  The camera swings inside and pans the inside of a claustrophobic cabinet, revealing the creepiest little doll I have ever seen.  With a disproportionately large head and eyes that cross outward instead of inward, the left cheek cracks and the eyeball rolls around in the doll’s socket.  That scene gave me nightmares.  Following the opening credits is where the meat of the story lies.  Sugiura (Yûka), an aspiring actress with no real charisma or charm or good looks, is in a lineup at an audition.  She never does anything to impress the director, a Mr. Matsumura (Shiina), but she still gets quite a few glances out of the corner of his eye.  In no time at all, she finds out she was cast in his film, a ‘based on true events’ movie called ‘Memory’ about a massacre that happened in 1970 in the Ono Kanko Hotel.  What started out as a holiday for a university professor and his family turned into one of his sick experiments.  He wound up his 8mm camera and began taping as he killed his son, a maid that walked in on the murder as it was being committed, and eight other helpless victims, finishing with his little daughter.  The only one spared was his wife.  In the end, he tuned the knife on himself.  Sugiura is cast as the little girl, an age inconsistency that the director dismisses by saying that he changed the age of the daughter for his film.  Soon thereafter, Sugiura is visited by a sickly little girl who drags that freakish doll around.  The girl shows up in a train, in her bedroom while she is sleeping, and countless other places, just staring at her.  Realizing that the little girl was the final victim of the massacre and the character she is portraying in the film, she begins to wonder if she is the little girl reincarnated.  One of the other girls that tried out for the film but turned the director off with her convoluted explanation that she was perfect for the role because she was murdered in her previous life reenters the film when she is consulted by a college student writing her paper on reincarnation.  She explains that she was hung because of a grotesque birthmark on her throat.  The girl she is talking to has strange dreams about the Ono Kanko Hotel even though she has never been there.  As the movie progresses, everyone becomes ensnarled in the same disturbing who’s-who cat-and-mouse game.