It is not uncommon for directors, who have made a name for themselves with their horror films, to venture out and tackle on new genres. Takashii Miike and Kiyoshi Kurosawa are two notable examples. It is much rarer for a director known for his feel-good films to suddenly change course and plunge himself into the darker recesses of the human mind, into the field of horror. Yet, that is exactly what Shinobu Yaguchi, who pleased audiences all around the world with Swing Girls (2004), Waterboys (2001), and Dance With Me (2019), has done by writing and directing Dollhouse.   

Yaguchi’s narrative opens with Yoshie (Masami Nagasawa) discovering that her 5-year-old daughter Mei (Totoka Honda), whom she left alone with her friends at the house to do some quick shopping, has disappeared. Later that night, she discovers the lifeless body of her child in her old washing machine.  

One year later, a depressed Yoshie finds an old doll at an antique market. She buys the doll without any hesitation, forcing it the gaping hole left by her deceased daughter. Her depressed mood is gone; they function, once more, as a family again. Not much later, Yoshie gives birth to her second child. The doll has seemingly played its part. Yet, five years later, Mai (Aoi Ikemura) discovers the doll in the closet and turns in into her new playmate Aya.

As our short synopsis signals, Yaguchi’s Dollhouse opens with a fleeting exploration of grief and the subjective effect of the discovery of the life-like doll on Yoshie. To get straight to the point, her acquisition of the doll allows her to cancel out, at the level of fantasy, the confrontation with the loss of her child and temporarily halt the process of grief. Yoshie turns the doll into a fetish-like object, an inanimate physical stand-in, that sustains the image of Mei and tethers all her motherly libidinal investment – She prepares food for the doll, dresses the doll in Mei’s clothes, cuts the doll’s hair in the style of her deceased daughter’s, … etc. 

What Yoshie establishes, by accident, is what is known within therapeutic circles as doll therapy. This therapy aims to ease the grieving process by giving the subject a transitional object, an object-lid to temporary close off the gaping hole of loss. The therapeutic hope is that, with time, the libido of the grieving subject will loosen itself from the inanimate doll, allowing him to accept his loss and inscribe it into the narrative of his subjectivity.

In Yoshie’s case, the end of her doll-therapy – what enables her to distance herself from Mei’s inanimate stand-in – is heralded by becoming mother again. As Yaguchi does not highlight the effect of this therapy on the grieving process, we can only assume that Mei functions, at least temporally, as an animate lid that closes off the inner demand to subjectify her loss (Narra-note 1).

The horrifying twist that Yaguchi introduces into his narrative is that the doll does not like this sudden retraction of loving libidinal investments. The brutal reduction by Yoshie to being merely a doll giving rise to an unutterable vengeful cocktail of hate and envy – “She says she’s jealous of me. Said it’s not fair that I’m the only one”.

The creepiness that slips into the atmosphere derives, first and foremost, from the fact that Yoshie acknowledges and rejects the doll as an object at the same time – she utilizes the doll to efface her loss and restore her own motherly ego. Later in the narrative, when the doll is radically treated as an object, its furtive attacks, its hair growth, hair loss, and nail production – all signs that something animate animates the object – ensures that the atmosphere remains perverted by an ominous threat.

In our view, what makes the ominous atmosphere truly effective is Yaguchi’s elegant play with the passion for ignorance. In the opening stages of the narrative, the creepiness within the atmosphere is caused by Yoshie’s refusal to acknowledge the inanimate materiality of the doll. Later in the film, after the birth of Mai, the threatening quality of the atmosphere is function of her struggle to acknowledge the animate truth of the doll, the truth of Aya as told and drawn by her daughter Mai.

However, as strange disconcerting occurrences concatenate, Yoshie cannot but accept the horrifying truth she has tried to dismiss. With this realization, the narrative dynamic that arouses creepiness transforms, finding its fuel in the riddle of how to cut the attachment of the doll to Yoshie as motherly figure and the bonds that formed between the doll and her precious daughter.

Of course, the narrative tricks to arouse creepiness only work when these manipulations are supported by a visual frame that can function as an amplifier. One of the compositional elements Yaguchi thoughtfully plays with throughout the narrative is the lightning design. The subtle shifts in lightning, the ebb and flow of darker colour-schemes and fleeting prominence of shadows, create a flow of psychological darkness.

The subtle changes in lightning function, first and foremost, as visual indications of Yoshie’s mental state (Sound-note 1). The shadowy darkness of depression and guilt that surrounds her and pervades the atmosphere is washed away by her installation of the doll within the familial interactional dynamic (e.g. making food for her) and the societal field (e.g. taking her along for shopping). Later, with Yoshie’s uncomfortable acceptance of an animate presence lingering within the doll, the colour-schemes grow dim again and a certain ominous darkness comes to structure the filmic frame once again. 

Besides the more subtle manipulation of lightning and colours, Yaguchi also exploits more radical lighting contrasts to strengthen the impact of certain the jump-scares. These moments, these brutal infractions of the otherworldly, are, moreover, decorated with threatening sounds (Sound-note 1).

If we look closer to the composition – the mix of restraint dynamism and static moments, we can discern three compositional stages: the emphasis on Yoshie, the emphasis on the doll, and a shared emphasis on Yoshie and the doll. The initial focus on Yoshie coincides with the familial dramatic opening of Dollhouse. The sudden compositional shift from Yoshie to the doll is not simply ominous, but introduces the visual foundation for Yaguchi to infuse his atmosphere with an uncomfortable creepiness and exploit slow dynamism for the purpose of delivering horror: to induce a sense of anticipatory dread into the spectator. Moreover, the atmospheric shift caused by this compositional change – from familial drama to horror-mystery, enables Yaguchi to exploit swifter shaky framing effectively and, thus, amplify the effect of the film’s more tensive sequences on the spectator.

All these compositional tricks and shifts ultimately culminate into a highly effective and impressive horror-finale. Yaguchi, by playing with evocative imagery and visual deception, creates a perplexing riddle whose finale image, whether expected or not, punches the spectator right into the gut.      

Masami Nagasawa gives an incredible performance as Yoshie, bringing the way unresolved guilt comes to (dis)organize one’s subjectivity – the signifier and the act, to life with heartbreaking precision. In the opening sequence of Dollhouse, for instance, the spectator merely has to watch Masami’s bodily presence to feel the usurping effect of the inner-tangle of anxiety and guilt on her body – the mental strain caused by the disappearance of Mei. Masami also delivers the same corporal presence to evoke the oppressive weight of guilt on Yoshie after the death of her beloved daughter.     

While the performance of Koji Seto as Yoshie’s husband is somewhat inconspicuous, it fits his character and the position Tadahiko assumes with respect to his wife. His comportment beautifully indicates that he operates as the servant of his wife’s demands – erase her lack, her desire – and the protector of her as ego. This stance becomes quite contradictory when he, for the good of his wife, refuses to take the truth she perceived seriously – “No, the problem isn’t the doll. It’s you.” – and demands her to stay at the hospital to re-stabilize her ego (Narra-note 2). 

Yaguchi’s Dollhouse is as great as conventional J-horror can get. While he does not seek to subvert genre expectations or re-invent the genre, he proves that there are still fresh ways to approach the dynamic of the curse (Noroi) and societal problem of child abuse. Dollhouse will please audiences new to the J-horror genre as well as long-time fans of the genre.

Notes

Narra-note 1: The fact that she, in a discussion with her daughter Mei, gives Mai a separate symbolic place – your sister, implies that she did succeed in reaching a certain resolution for her loss. This scene, moreover, emphasizes that she has excised the period of doll therapy from her subjectivity – all the pictures with the doll are gone.

Later in the narrative, Yoshie underlines, by holding a picture of her deceased daughter, that to truly resolve her grief she must resolve the doll’s suffering. It is, in other words, only by closing the doll’s lack, the fear of separation and abandonment that animates all her vengeful attacks, that she will be able to truly undo her loss from its traumatic shine – and give it its righteous symbolic place within her subjective narrative.

Sound-note 1: We must highlight that while Dollhouse starts off as a simple familial drama, there are already subtle and unsubtle indications of the not- yet-realized dimension of psychological horror. Besides the lightning-designs, Yaguchi also decorates his compositions with threatening sounds that give certain turns and twists an ominous quality.

The most unsubtle aural indication that Dollhouse is a horror-drama concerns the threatening sounds that accompany Yoshie’s traumatic discovery of her daughter’s body and the title of the narrative.

Sound-note 2: Yaguchi decorates scenes offering more psychological horror – the horror of realization, the horror of phantasmatic productions, with the same kind of ominous kind. 

Narra-note 2: The logic of the husband explains why he, despite not believing his wife’s signifiers concerning the doll, agrees with her request to bring the doll to Jojuji Temple to do a ritual burning – “If that’ll help you feel better.”.