Introduction

While Eiichiro Hasumi is not a well-known Japanese director, anyone who loves Japanese cinema has surely seen one or movies he directed, be it his Oppai Volleyball (2009), Assassination Classroom (2015) and its sequel Assassination Classroom: Graduation (2016), or The Sun Does Not Move (2021). Of course, those who peruse Netflix might have come across his latest film, Re/Member (2022), a horror narrative based on web novel Karada Sagashi by Welzard. 

Review

Just after the second-world war, a mysterious event called body-search starts spreading all over the world – one day repeats until all body parts of a child are found and placed in a coffin. One night, just after twelve o’clock, Asuka Morisaki (Kanna Hashimoto), Rie Naruto (Mayuu Yokota), Takahiro Ise (Gordon Maeda), Shota Uranishi (Kotaro Daigo), Atsushi Kiyomiya (Fuju Kamio), a hikikomori, and Rumiko (Maika Yamamoto) find themselves trapped in such game. Why are they caught up within this game of finding body-parts? And whose body-parts are they looking for? And what will happen when all the body-parts are collected?

Re/member shows, with its opening sequence, how the formation of cliques within the class does not merely create divisions, but how these lines of social division are exploited for pleasure by bullying or slandering those who are considered Other. Hasumi, in fact, echoes how subjects of a certain social fabric invest in a fiction of homogeneity and harmony by creating and enjoying the outcasts.    

The repetition of the same day, something that can only be resolved by finishing the body-search game, offers our chosen ones a chance to change the way certain events unfold. As the repetition accumulate, the spectator easily feels that the true goal of the deathly search for body-parts is not the completion of the body as such, but the overcoming of a certain conflict or emptiness – subjective as well as relational – that inhibits and troubles those who are forced to join the game. The immediate impact of being stuck in the game is that the relations between our six members start changing – the game binds them together and allows feelings of camaraderie to blossom between them (Narra-note 1).

It is quite evident that Re/member does not aim to deliver horror in a narrative way, but merely in a visual manner. The narrative, structured around the dynamic of repetition, radically alters the reality of death. In this gamified event, death is not only a transitory event but also unavoidable – the monstrous girl with her doll will keep on murdering until all the body-parts are collected. The deflating of a narrative sense of horror is instrumental in allowing more frivolous moments to come to their full right (e.g. the body-searching sequence decorated with a more up-tempo song, our friends’ beach-outing) and enabling the spectator to invest in the bonds, amical as well as romantic, that are formed between our chosen ones (Narra-note 2, narra-note 3).  

Another effect of this choice is that the horror-effect becomes limited to the visualisation of the deaths, which allows some spectators to look forward to these blood-soaked moments. As death is merely temporary within the body-searching game, the spectator becomes also able to enjoy the various ways our girl smashes, cuts, … etc. our main characters to death.

The infusing of tension in the fabric of the narrative, realized by adding sudden moments of shaky framing and/or decorating certain moments with threatening musical accompaniment or eerie sounds, comes to serve two different but intertwining functions. These elements do not only aim to make the bursts of violence more effective and unsettling, but also support the anticipation of the spectator to see blood splurging on the screen and heighten the enjoyment with the violent pay-off that, in most cases, follows. 

The moments of tension within Re/Member are further decorated by Eiichiro Hasumi with visual elements that are quite commonly found within horror narratives – e.g. the use of facial close-ups and slow zoom-in movement, the choice to let some of the violence happen off-screen to arouse the spectator’s imagination. While these decorative elements do not support the flow of the tension as such, they do help heightening the impact of the violent moments on the spectator and the ability to savour the murders of the blood-soaked girl. 

Hasumi’s Re/Member is, in short, a pleasant experience that succeeds in offering both the thrills of a horror-slasher as well as a touching exploration of romantic and amical feelings. While many directors have burned themselves at such genre-blending exercise, Hasumi succeeds in this endeavour because he does not attempt to infuse a sense of atmospheric dread in the mundane, hereby allowing both realities to come to their full emotional right.

Notes

Narra-note 1: Even though the game, once finished, will erase their memories, the game does alter them subjectively. This statement is corroborated by Atsushi Kiyomiya’s sudden return to school and the ease by which our protagonists become friends again.

Narra-note 2: Yet, for the finale, the sense of horror is heightened by giving death a renewed meaning – i.e. whoever is devoured by the monster is erased from the temporal repetition. This narrative twist does not only make the finale sequence more tensive and thus more enjoyable by raising the stakes, but also enhance the impact of the resolution of the narrative.

Narra-note 3: The after-credits sequence will puzzle many spectators. Yet, in the opening of the narrative the following sentence is stated: And then they acted as a substitute for her, becoming her sacrifice. And they disappear without a trace. In other words, the person who completes the body by placing the head in the coffin is doomed to become the substitute – the next dismembered body of an eight-year-old -and the new shape of the monstrous being chasing the chosen ones. 

Of course, this narrative element creates even more questions. Why does the person who completes the body become a dismembered eight-year-old in the next game? Why does the body-searching game continually repeat? Who is the murderer? And did the body our friends completed once belong to an adolescent or adult too?