The murders of the members of an average Japanese family also provide the backstory for Reincarnation, which takes a more "meta" approach to delineating the common ground between the world of the living and the realm of the dead. The script by Shimizu and frequent assistant director Masaki Adachi attends the troubled production of a contemporary movie-in-the-making about a series of slayings thirty-five years earlier. In 1970, an ostensibly deranged professor murdered nine guests and employees of the rural Ono Kanko Hotel, along with his young son and daughter. (Also seriously wounded was the professor's wife, who later recovered.) Obsessed by the tragedy, a popular filmmaker, his cast and his crew decamp to the now-abandoned hotel to gather inspiration and to allow the actors to "feel" their parts as victims of the insane academic's merciless rage. Presented in compliment to this story is the parallel tale of a young woman who, haunted by recurring dreams of a red-roofed hotel she has never visited, sets out on a personal quest to determine the primacy of cryptomnesia (the recollection of repressed memories) over déjà vu and reincarnation. (Look for Pulse director Kiyoshi Kurosawa in a fleeting cameo as a sober-sided instructor.) As this is a Takashi Shimizu movie, it should not be difficult to guess which interpretation wins out.
Part of the ghoulish attraction for the living to accounts of mass murder, both factual and fictive, is a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I vicariousness in which the reader/viewer can walk in the shoes of the doomed and witness his/her own death via a luckless surrogate. Shimizu deconstructs this necro-erotic (and perhaps narcissistic) fascination in scenes in which film director Matsumura (Gonin's Kippei Shiina) matches his fresh-faced performers to grainy newspaper pictures of the 1970 murder victims; later, Matsumura even has his actors lie and be photographed in the spots where the victims fell, painstakingly posing them in accurate death tableaux while "intuitive" starlet Nagisa (Yûka) flashes on the victims' awful last moments of life. At the same time, college student Yayoi (Karina) makes the acquaintance of aspiring actress Yuka (Marika Matsumoto), who was passed over for a part as a victim in Matsumura's movie even though she strongly feels she was murdered in a past life and has the rope burn birthmark to prove it. When Yuka (who confesses that she is the reincarnation of one of the slain hotel workers) disappears inexplicably, Yayoi delves deeper into the mystery... while Nagisa, plagued by visions of the deaths of the Omori children, becomes convinced that she is the reincarnation of the killer's daughter and last victim.
Presented in the context of the making of a horror film, Reincarnation channels earlier attempts in this recursive vein, from The Exorcist (1973) and The House of Seven Corpses (1974) to Return to Horror High (1987) and Hideo Nakata's Ghost Actress (Joyû-rei, 1996). The film also seeds its mise-en-scène with visual cues from Herk Harvey's Carnival of Souls (1962), Mario Bava's Kill, Baby... Kill (Operazione Paura, 1966), George Romero's Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Day of the Dead (1985), John Carpenter's Halloween (1978) and Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980), while tipping its hat to Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (1960) with the revelation that Omori's freakout was in fact a clinical experiment (and one recorded with a whirring 8mm camera). On paper, all of these references to past films (whether intentional or unconscious) would seem to make Reincarnation a bit top-heavy... yet the aggregation of homagery works because repetition, parallelism and recreation are the soul of its anguished plot. Shimizu engenders viewer uncertainty by staging nightmares within nightmares and by cutting between interiors of the hotel both in its dilapidated present state and pristine past life... and occasionally revealing the latter to be not the actual site but a minutely-detailed soundstage copy. Comparing fledgling actors desperate to get their faces seen with lost souls longing to be accounted for, Shimizu suggests that life is suffused with "a soul of regret," amounting to little more than an apocalyptic consummation devoutly to be wished. That Reincarnation's restless dead eventually cross the threshold to do the Romero shuffle seems an appropriate progression given that it was George Romero himself who wrote, in his screenplay for Tom Savini's remake of Night of the Living Dead (1990), "We're them and they're us."
This radical rethinking of the winded tenets of J-horror did not turn out to be the cash cow that was Ju-on at the time of its general release in early 2006. Nonetheless, the film received a wide international release as part of Lions Gate Entertainment's first annual "After Dark Horrorfest" and is penciled in for an American-financed remake. Released previously on Asian and British DVD labels, Reincarnation makes its American DVD debut as part of the "After Dark" series of discs, alongside the gnarly likes of The Butcher Brothers' The Hamiltons and J. S. Cardone's Wicked Little Things. Lions Gate's Region 1 DVD looks especially fine, letterboxed at 1.78:1 and enhanced for 16x9 playback. Colors are rich and black levels entrancingly deep. The Japanese language soundtrack boasts subtly evocative Dolby Digital 5.1 and 2.0 mixes, with optional English and Spanish subtitles, as well as close captioning for the hearing impaired. Bonus features run to a 50-second (and disposable) introduction by director Shimizu, a whopping 26-minutes of deleted scenes (with optional commentary and including an unused original opening), a 10-minute interview with Shimizu taped at Burbank's Dark Delicacies bookstore (in which the filmmaker discusses his authorial decision to break from the standard "rules" of J-horror) and an hour-long making-of featurette offering a wealth of behind-the-scenes detail and testimonials from the cast and crew.
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by Richard Harland Smith
