Introduction

Takashi Shimizu is one of master of J-horror that continues to create horror narratives for audiences to savour. Yet, his recent work has not been that consistent. While his village trilogy – Howling Village (2020), Suicide Forest Village (2021) and Ox-Head Village (2022) – succeeded in pleasing many spectators by being serviceable horror films, his Homunculus (2021) was a horrendous failure, an experience more frustrating than enjoyable. So, how does Shimizu’s Immersion fare? Another failure, a mere serviceable horror experience, or something subversive?      

Review

One day, brain scientist Tomoniko Kataoka (Daigo Nishihata) travels to an island to join Synthekai VR, a start-up company consisting of programmers Haruki Yamamoto (Yuta Hiraoka), Mio Fukazawa (Rina Fukasawa), and Aoi Miura (Noa Kawazoe), engineer Koji Kitajima (Atomu Mizuishi), to further enhance the ‘New World Project’.

Before arriving on the island, the research team chief Ide (-) tells him in a perfect VR rendition of the island about the project. Yet, before, he can shake her hand, Kataoka’s VR glasses are suddenly pulled off. The red dress of the chief and the island so beautifully recreated in VR disappears to reveal the face of Rin Kinjo (Ami Toma), a local high school student interested in the weird thing on his head.   

Arrived at the headquarters, he immediately gets down to business and puts on the VR Goggles. Yet, while things at first seem normal on the virtual island, the sun suddenly evaporates, throwing everything in darkness. From a nearby shack, an unidentifiable woman appears.

Despite using signifies like brain synchronicity and the like, Immersion is not a narrative that explores the dangers of the ongoing virtualization of the world. Rather, Shimizu envisions the virtual and VR as a new gateway for the otherworldly to burst forth in the mundane societal field. The otherworldly will always finds its way to express itself violently in the living world, the field structured by signifiers.

Once one has dismissed the reading of Immersion as a warning against technology, one can easily see that Shimizu delivers a quite familiar narrative where a vengeful otherworldly spirit, the imajo, exploits technology to not only enact revenge on an ignorant societal field but to demand something from that field. The former is underlined by the string of deaths happen through immersive VR-technology, the latter is implied by the fact that Tamaki Sonoda (Mizuki Yamamoto) and Kataoka, when trying to find their way around the island through the internet, irreversible end up a mysterious beach-side Torii-gate near the house of Minami Toki (Taeko Yoshida), the local shaman. 

What the violent female spirit desires is not simply blood and destruction, but societal recognition for her suffering – causing death is, in a certain sense, her only form of communication. Her destructive intrusion in the virtual field is, first and foremost, a demand to uncover the secret of her death and grasp the societal dynamic that caused her demise. The drowned bodies are, in other words, a sign signalling the Other’s continued blindness and a violent appeal for someone to uncover what has been erased from the societal field – the imajo wants her unjustly inflicted trauma to be inscribed in the contemporary societal field and integrated within the symbolic fabric.

What is the societal dynamic the vengeful ghost wants to see uncovered and emphasized? The situation of Shigeru Niino (Takashi Sasano), who is bullied by elementary students and shunted by the other townsfolk, and Rin Kinjo, who is bullied by classmates, offers the spectator the key to that mystery. The dynamic the imajo wants to highlight with blood is the one of exploiting a subject for mere pleasure and to get a fleeting but deceptive affirmation of one’s superiority or one’s supposed normality.

It is therefore not surprising that the birth of the imajo on the island is caused by a similar societal dynamic. The violent rape she was subjected to – her body reduced to an object to be exploited for the male’s sexual pleasure – and the forced inscription as adulteress into the societal field led to her cruel but joyous torture and murder. She is, however, not merely sacrificed by the villagers to protect the dynamic of the ‘mundane’ societal field and erase the male transgression – the destructive nature of the blind phallus – but annihilated for everyone’s pleasure – a societal spectacle, a feast of blood and cruelty. The way the narrative unfolds – e.g. the role Shigeru ultimately plays – corroborates the fact that the otherworldly violence aims, at its core, at the blindness of the Other and its exploitation of subjects for some pleasure. The horrifying violence forms, by itself, a societal critique (Narra-note 1, Narra-note 2). 

The composition, while featuring static moments, is full of subtle and slow dynamism. Of course, many of the visual genre decorations are present as well, like slow zoom-ins, the focus on facial expressions to emphasize the presence of something horrifying that fragmentary enters the narrative frame, and the fleeting intrusion of horror (e.g. a slow hand moving behind the character, a vague female shape standing in the hallway, …) that disturbs the mundane by lurking around the character and threatening him.    

Unsurprisingly, the dynamism follows a clear rhythm and pattern within the narrative. The mundane moments, where the vicious otherworldly presence is absent within the shadows, follows a more straightforward visual blend. The visual decorations common to horror-compositions only infest the composition to disturb this ‘deceptive’ mundane fabric (Cine-note 1). The slowness of the dynamism helps heightening the atmospheric tension as it visually manipulates the spectator’s expectations. By frustrating the spectator’s desire to see, Shimizu engenders a wish to not see within his audiences.

However, the power of this dynamism to instil a quantum of uneasiness and fear is not merely due to its slowness. The musical accompaniment as well as the darkish colour-schemes and lightning design play an important role in making the dynamism so effective. While the music echoes the presence of (subjective) tension, supporting the birth of anticipatory fear within the spectator, the darkish nature of the visual frame corroborates the presence of something to be feared – the dark shadows are, in a certain sense, pregnant with lurking ‘evil’.  

Immersion delivers a pleasant yet highly familiar J-horror experience. Rather than seeking the re-invent the genre and pushing it forward, Shimizu merely reformulates the dynamic of the imajo in a more contemporary setting. Spectators looking for something new and fresh will find little to like about Shimizu’s latest, yet those who seek a similar experience as Hideo Nakata’s Ring (1999) will not be disappointed.

Notes

Cine-note 1: Due to the horror-sequence that opens the narrative,the spectator knows that the mundane peacefulness that marks atmosphere is deceptive. The characters, in contrast, revel within this false sense of security. 

The subtle visual repetition of the torii-gate – once in the horror-sequence and once as a real presence on the island, underlines that what happens in the horror sequence is related to folklore and Shinto, the Japanese indigenous religion.  

Narra-note 1: The solution to the intrusion of the otherworldly presence is always contradictory. While the solution lies in knowledge about the horrific event and realizing the suffering of the imajo, it also constitutes a silencing, an erasure of the horrific truth that structures the Other.

In other words, her suffering never gets the inscription she vies for. It is thus not surprising that the narrative implies that the silencing of the Imajo is only temporary.

Narra-note 2: The social awkwardness that marks Tomohiko Kataoka is not, as one might think, due to his fixation on his work. Rather, his fixation on computers and his scientific work – the cold calculated letter of science – is a defence against the Other, an effective way to avoid the gaze, the physical presence of the other as well as his desire.

This reading of Kataoka’s presence within the societal field is corroborated by the way he socially interacts with the chief within the virtual world. The radical subtraction of the body – of the real of the body – deradicalizes and demystifies the gaze and the riddle of the Other’s desire. Due to this virtualization, it becomes easier for him to interact with the bodiless and virtual other.

Yet, while the element of social awkwardness is featured in the narrative, Shimizu is unable to  exploit it well enough to strengthen the emotional flow of his horror-narrative. To put it more concretely, Shimizu is unable to make the shift in Kataoka’s presence truly believable – the change is too sudden.