Marebito--In Conclusion

An interesting development happens midway through Marebito concerning “lost time”. 12 seconds to be exact. Masuoka keeps two cameras on the girl from Tokyo Underneath, often staring intently at the monitors when not keeping tabs on her condition. She seems to be getting sick, crouching in the floor, or lost in her own world. The monitors go out for approximately 12 seconds. Masuoka wonders what happened during those 12 seconds.

Masuoka took her from her natural habitat (whatever that natural habitat really is), and she can’t seem to function in the Tokyo Modern. Can’t eat or drink. She just can’t seem to function at all. He just calls her “F”, and keeps her in his home. It gets weirder, too. After the 12 seconds of lost time, Masuoka gets a call from someone who tells him he shouldn’t have taken her from Tokyo Underneath, because she doesn’t belong in the world that exists in contemporary Tokyo among the living. When he walks outside, on the streets, people who pass have faces distorted (as if a television program concludes into white noise into the later hours). While recording passersby, one of the walking public beats him up and takes the tape from Masuoka’s Panasonic camcorder! Approaching the entrance to his apartment complex, Masuoka spots a woman looking at him accusingly. He just beats her into the elevator, rides up to his apartment, finger bleeding from a broken piece of glass from his camcorder, and F looks lustfully at the blood with an appetite needing quenched. She even sniffs his finger, and totally bloodthirsty, with Masuoka’s approval (he damn near sticks the finger in her mouth, for Petesake!), starts to lick. The way she takes to his finger resembled, to me, a blowjob. To please her, Masuoka gets a boxcutter from his toolbox, opens up the finger, and allows F to get her fill. It is probably a strange mixture of eww and arousing; depending on how you view this further delve into the depraved and unpleasant, it will have adverse reactions. I have to admit that I get more than a bit queasy when you have a lot of razor blade, torn flesh, blood, and sucking. I’m a small doses kind of gore fan in that regard.

Masuoka says he’d be willing to die for her, but if he’s dead what would happen to her? He says he gave up treating her human, deciding to act as the guardian of a pet, of an animal. But when she begins to behave more human, is it because of her imitating him or actual evolution?

Madness is contagious. Recently I attract madness…I wonder why.

Yeah, I wonder.

Well, he comes home and the whole place is trashed. She’s gone. He goes out to find her, with no such luck. He returns after crashing into a heap near an abandoned building, visualizes suicide man, and returns to find her with bloody fingers (asleep, flopped on a blanket like a dosing mutt). She went on the hunt, no longer needing the master to bring her some slop. The strange woman eyeing him claims that their daughter is missing and her name is Fuyumi (!), asking if he is hiding her at his home. Let’s just say Masuoka puts all of this to rest relatively in quick order. Oh, but not to let the opportunity go to waste, he shoots the body with his camera after death! Not just that, so much blood available that can be put to good use. His descent to madness is complete. He says he doesn’t recognize himself anymore.

 

In a bit of dark irony, Masuoka actually shoots his own crime scene. The murder of a high school girl. Her throat slit so he can have her blood for his F, Masuoka has no qualms killing for that supply. He calls a phone booth with no one on the other end (director Shimizu actually shows the phone booth, empty), talking to suicide man about how F is satisfied and tame. Long gone is Masuoka’s sanity.

We have to remember when watching this that we’re spending the entire running time with a madman. We can’t really objectively accept anything much we see except perhaps his actions towards victims. He sees a guy that committed suicide. He talks with him. That girl he has could be his daughter. He’s a creep.

The terror. That’s what he wants. He is embracing mad so he can have that terror. Suicide man tells him that Masuoka wants to experience that terror he so longs for because it is unknown, ancient wisdom. Again, Masuoka is bonkers. It isn’t until the very end that he comes clean with himself and admits the truth, acknowledging his murderous ways so he could drive himself insane. Mission, accomplished.

You…came back to me.

By film’s end, Masuoka gives his “life’s blood” to F. He allows her to take him to Tokyo Underneath. He no longer needs words so he will not speak. He no longer needs the camera. Now he can be captured as suicide man was…with eyes full of fear. He got what he so desired.

Shinya Tsukamoto is really known probably for his awesome Tetsuo movies, but he's great at roles portraying men gone mentally berserk. He's great for the part in this movie. Cold and mad, this part seems perfectly suited to Tsukamoto's acting style. I think you literally see mental deterioration as we follow him. Director Shimizu was fortunate to get Tsukamoto, but Shimizu's so good at what he does that the two work wonders in how to unsettle and disturb.

If I had a top 10 list for the decade of 2000-2010, Shimizu's Ju-on: The Grudge would certainly make the list high up there. It is the film that typically is mentioned almost immediately when this director's resume comes up when speaking of his work. But I think Marebito is the film in the conversation that cries aloud for some attention. It delivers some real creeps. Shimizu brings the spectres (in this case, imagined) we expect, but, for me, there's something even more unnerving about the ones that show up here. The wife and high school girl are reminders of his handiwork and return as examples of his mania. Shimizu, to me, just knows how to produce dividends with his horror movies. I think he's one hell of a filmmaker.