Somewhere within the mountainous Shikoku Island lives Miki (Yûki Amami), a beautiful, reclusive middle-aged paper maker. She spends her days at her wooden mill crafting large sheets of paper and gathering the roots and herbs she needs to make it along the gorgeous surrounding mountainside forests; Her tools are the same her ancestors used going back centuries, but she wants for nothing more.
Meanwhile a young teacher Akira (Atsuro Watabe) is assigned a new post in the nearby town of Onime. His arrival will change everything.
Odd dreams spread like a plague, keeping everyone from getting a good night's sleep. A man comes from Tokyo, kills his family and then commits suicide. The local delivery girl falls over, dead in an instant, her tongue blackened. Meanwhile Miki suddenly finds she doesn't need glasses any more, and looks younger every day.
Her family, the Bonomiyas, have ancient roots in the area. And an ancient obligation: As Miki learns from her mother, it is the burden of the women of the clan to bear an urn that contains the Inugami, ancient, spiteful dog spirits, that are apparently let loose when the urn bearer lets loose her emotions.
The townsfolk are well aware of the Inugami curse, and react to their misfortunes in about a rational and sane a fashion as you'd expect in a situation that bears many parallels to witchcraft. As the Bonomiyas stage their annual ancestor festival, tensions come to a head.
Inugami is a deeply odd movie. It was released at the height of the J-Horror phenomenon (the same year as Kairo) and its narrative is built around a curse; Technically, it more than qualifies as folk horror.
But writer/director Masato Harada (whose filmography seems to consist mostly of stately dramas and love stories) downplays almost every genre element until the final stretch, and the end result reminded me more of the great South American magical realist family sagas of Isabel Allende or Gabriel Garcia Márquez.
The result is a thoughtful, languid, deeply affecting film that judiciously dissects traditionalism and women's roles in traditional Japanese society from multiple angles.
On the one hand, before Akira, before things went to shit, Miki was completely fulfilled as she was, even with the terrible hand she was dealt* - hell, for most of the movie, she fights to keep things as they are. On the other hand... well, everything. The Bonomiya women are also clear-eyed about their situation; One of them memorably summarizes it as the men treating them "like fleas on their ancestor's sides."
And to drive home how far we've come as a society, part of the finale is shot in black and white.
Harada's script (based on a novel by Masako Bando) takes its sweet time getting anywhere, but his characters are well written, the love story is affecting, and the film is full of warmth and low-key humour. The direction is sometimes cack-handed (particularly his subjective handling of a seizure), but for the most part this is a playful, gorgeous movie, with both him and cinematographer Jun'ichi Fujisawa working in concert to convey the beauty of the film's natural surroundings.
There's a recurring transition technique that slowly turns on lights until the scene is set that is nothing short of beautiful. Harada also stages some truly memorable imagery, from a surrealist dream that repurposes Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson to a gaggle of Shinto priests congregating under a derelict bus stop.
The association with the J-Horror movement seems to have hurt the film, which flew under most radars To the point where it's rarely mentioned along with other examples of the genre, if at all. But for my money, it's right up there with the best (for those counting at home: Kairo, Audition, Black Water, this.) That's if you want to count it as horror at all. Which I do, personally, just don't expect it to even attempt to scare you.
*: And the fates really do have it in for the poor woman; She's got the luck of the hero in a classic Greek tragedy, right down to an (easy to foresee) twist regarding Akira.
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