Japanese movies that won't leave me alone.
::spoilers::
So, Hoye-sensei mentions that a Japanese movie would be playing this past Friday at the Environment Science Building. Intrigued, I decide to go that night and see it. Hideo Nakata of Ringu fame (but not Juon; Juon was directed by Takashi Shimizu) directs this flick, which centers around the relationship between a divorced mother (Yoshimi) and her six year-old daughter (Ikuko). Due to the divorce, Yoshimi is forced to move into a rather unsavory apartment with Ikuko, due to financial constraints. As a single working mother (who happens to have past issues with her own mother growing up), Yoshimi does her best to try to keep herself together (sometimes unsucessfully) as custody proceedings still go on. The relationship between Yoshimi and Ikuko really made me identify with them alot, simply because my mom was a single parent as well. There were times where things would go really rough for Yoshimi, and I was just on the verge of tears because I could see my mother in some similar positions (though not *nearly* as extreme as in this film).
So. The scary bits of this film. Of course, the apartment that the mother and daughter pair move into is directly below one in which a missing girl once lived in with her father. There are some genuine moments where my hair went on end, but not nearly as much as when I watched Ju-on. In fact, the strong point of this film for me was the relationship portrayed between the mother and the daughter, along with fleshing out the point of view of Yoshimi so well. I truly cared about these characters, unlike the time when I watched Ringu. When Yoshimi had to make the ultimate choice of sacrificing herself to being the "mother" of the ghost in the end to save her daughter, I was in tears. When I left my seat after it was all over, I was so devastated. I WANTED them to make it in the end, but only Ikuko did, and even ten years later, she still really did need her mother by her side (as her father decided to remarry and have more children). Ugh, ugh, ugh~~!~! I really was hoping that Yoshimi and Ikuko would just be able to run away and move somewhere else, but the ghost probably would have followed them, anyhow. But I can't say that I hate the ending; it made sense... but it was still so depressing... like, the Violinist of Hameln's ending could be considered "tragically beautiful," but this ending was just... so full of despair, so full of something that was lost on a different level (though you could argue the depressing-ness of Hamel and Flute's end muchly, but the actual *impact* made on me wasn't as profoundly unsettling). A mother is condemned to being a surrogate to a ghost for an eternity so that her daughter may live a somewhat normal life. Yoshimi... kyaaaaaaa ; o ;.
... Now I really want to read the short story it's based off of.
... And now I'd really like to sleep, but every little noise in the room is setting me off again. This is what happens when I decide to watch anything horror related > o >;;. I swear, my kick with Japanese horror flicks is just like my addiction to salsa; I keep gobbling it up, even though it burns. So much.
>o> D;;; We can watch Kairo, and Don't Look Up (Joyu-rei), and Chaos, and... and... yeah. That thing, called a bed. I'm going toward that now... and will stop thinking about how that shopping bag created a perfect shadow of the ghost from Dark Water...