“What is reality? And what lies deep within our hearts? How do fears and desires take shape?” 

With the many young directors trying their best to bring their unique vision to the genre of horror, one might forget that there are also more seasoned directors who do their best to keep the ailing genre alive. While most agree that Jiro Nagae is a director that leans towards traditional Japanese horror, his sequel to Kisaragi Station (2022) proves that he is not afraid or experimenting. It is, in fact, by experimenting that Nagae and screenwriter Takeshi Miyamoto ensures that the sequel is not merely a rehash and reshuffle of Kisaragi Station’s narrative, that the interesting premise by which the first film ended gets an elaboration that feels familiar and fresh at the same time.

Despite her miraculous return from the otherworldly place, the life of Asuka Miyazaki (Miyu Honda) has not been easy. By missing twenty years of her life, she cannot but feel like an anachronistic presence within the societal field. Her absence coupled with the lack of aging puts her at odds with her former classmates whose have started working and have started families. She has, moreover, become the object of slander by those occult-lovers who consider her a fraud.

Together with Hitomi Kadonaka (Megumi Okina), a journalist and film-director, she decides to make a documentary about her and the other survivors. As she visits each of the survivors, she realizes that they have not fared any better.

A week before the planned broadcast, Kadonaka tells Asuka that the station, due to the barrage of threats delivered at the station’s address, has opted not to broadcast the documentary. Affected by the news and Kadonaka’s non-committal response on whether she truly believes her, Asuka decides to procure definite proof: rescue Haruna Tsutsumi (Yuri Tsunematsu) from the otherworldly space called Kisaragi Station. 

While the mockumentary-style has been done before in the horror-genre, this approach works surprisingly well for the opening of Kisaragi Station: re. The mockumentary quickly refreshes the spectator’s memory – or bring people who have not seen the first film up to speed, and re-affirm, within a frame of fiction, the reality of what happened in the Otherworldly place and what the survivors, since their return, have endured.

Nagae’s choice to establish the narrative hook via a mockumentary styled opening, however, does not merely seek to infuse a ‘fictional’ sense of reality into the unfolding of the narrative to amplify the dramatic atmosphere and the effect of the splatter, but also to brutally pull him into the narrative by introducing a new mystery concerning the urban legend (General-note 1). All narrative fragments – i.e. Shota Ishi’s suicide, Miki Matsui’s hysterical attack at the hospital, Junko Hayama’s act of imprisoning her daughter Rin (Nanami Taki) – point to the fact that something of the otherworldly clings to the survivors – “Don’t let it go outside”.   

The mockumentary ends by introducing the spectator to what seems to the narrative gamble. However, the spectator should not fall into the trap of considering these questions – What lies deep within our hearts? How do fears and desires take shape? – as narrative buoys to orient the spectator’s interpretation of what subsequently unfolds. This is affirmed by the narrative counteracting of the possible effect of Kadonaka’s evocative questions on the spectator by confronting him with a surprising twist: Asuka, upon her return to this Otherworldly place, informs Haruna that she plans to remain there as sacrificial object – as the object to save others.

The spectator, of course, quickly grasps that Haruna’s choice to turn herself into the sacrifice is a direct consequence of being treated as trash within the mundane world – She wants to feel useful and feel able to make a difference. However, the turn to become the sacrificial object is not simply a flight from the cruelty of the mundane world, but also an attempt to repair her status in the mundane world.

As the narrative unfolds – and the loops in Kisaragi station concatenate, the spectator eventually realizes that Kadonaka’s questions put emphasis on the wrong subject. While Kadonaka questions the speaking subject – a psychologizing reflex that corroborates her lingering disbelief in Haruna’s story, the spectator is invited to explore the aim of the eye-ball with its tentacled tips. What does this hungry force, which infects people till they explode from within and exploits the dead by creating zombie-like copies pleading for help, want?

The loop-structure of the film invites the spectator to think beyond the logic of desire and focus on what the force repeats: the production of transgressive jouissance by murdering subjects in a gamified fashion. The eye-ball keeps production jouissance, keeps repeating the circuit of the drive. Subjects, who are caught within this gamified space, are tasked to break out this cycle of blind perverse pleasure (Narra-note 1). 

Kisaragi station stages, in this sense, nothing other than the destructive capitalistic dynamic that perverts the societal field and seduces subjects to exploit others for their own enjoyment. The otherworldly place exposes in a brutal yet exaggerated way the reality of the contemporary societal field. The contemporary subject, seduced by the imperative to enjoy, seeks – peering with their eyeballs – for subjects whom they can attack, exploit and subjectively explode to satisfy the need to produce pleasure. On the other hand, the contemporary subject fears to become the object of the other’s thrust to enjoy himself, of the narcissism that dooms each relation with the other into a vicious competition. This final shot of the film evocatively leaves the spectator wondering: can the logic of capitalistic exploitation be broken? 

What keeps the spectator compelled throughout Kisaragi Station: Re is the rather fast-pace by which the narrative unfolds. As the spectator knows, either from the introduction of by seeing the first film, how a loop in this Otherworldly space unfolds, Nagae can skip the moments of sameness, explore the differences between the subsequent loops, and focus on struggle to solve the deadly puzzle that will procure the door of light. Due to this faster pace, Kisaragi Station: Re does not feel like a traditional J-horror film, but more like a horror-flavoured comedy-thriller.

It will come to no surprise that the composition of Kisaragi-station Re: echoes the documentary-styled structure of the narrative in its composition. The opening twenty minutes are brought to life with a combination of subtly shaky hand-held footage, crude camera-movement, interview-shots where the character in focus addresses the interviewer behind the camera, and jump-cuts. 

After the mockumentary introduction has concluded, the composition settles for a more straightforward blend of static shots, restraint dynamic movement (slow-zoom in, …) and cruder dynamic moments. Nagae utilizes various compositional techniques common to horror films within his composition, yet, due to the fast-pace of the narrative, these moments do not sort the effect (e.g. rising the tension) they commonly have within J-horror narrative.

Nagae knows how to utilize decorative elements (slow-motion, …etc.) in an effective way. For instance, To frame the transition from the mundane world to the otherworldly space around Kisaragi station, Nagae relies on a fluid blend of visual and aural distortions (i.e. images twist and twirl, darkish tunnel imagery concatenates fast, colourful yet diverging duplication of the interior of the train evokes its penetration into the otherworldly, oppressive sounds contrast with radical silences, the fast pace of the whooshing sounds of the train as it passes through the tunnel to what lies beyond the mundane).      

However, when Nagae relies on special effects to bring the horror to life, the narrative always threatens to derail. While the effects are serviceable, the director cannot wash away the fakeness that clings to these visual elements, e.g. the tentacles, the explosions. However, due to the high pace of the film, the spectator is eventually able to glance over the fakeness of these effects and enjoy the denouement of the film.      

The mockumentary-style of Kisaragi Station: Re opening also effects the dimension of the musical accompaniment – from the subtle mysterious tunes to the restrained dramatic pieces. The music is organized by two different editing instances – one real and one fictional one. Masakazu Ohashi, the editor of the mockumentary, has a fictional counterpart, the invisible editor of the documentary surrounding Asuka and Kisaragi station. However, for the spectator, this doubling does not really change the way he experiences the music. 

The sparse moments of music within Kisaragi Station: Re are effective in guiding the spectator’s emotions not only because they are subtly interwoven in the visual flow, but also because the feed from the fictional sense of reality generated by the stylistic markers of the documentary genre.

Kisaragi Station: Re is a sequel done right. Jiro Nagae and Takeshi Miyamoto introduce some interesting flavours to the narrative recipe to not only ensure that their sequel offers heaps of fun, but also thematically develops the space of Kisaragi Station in a meaningful way. This fun horror-thriller, eventually, invites the spectator to consider the dynamic between the lurking presence and the visitors it constantly eyes as staging the uncomfortable truth of our contemporary societal field. 

Notes

General-note 1: We would, however, have liked Nagae to go all the way with his documentary-styled opening and use ‘re-enactment footage’ instead of mere images of the first film.

Narra-note 1: There is one element within the plot that will form an obstacle for the thoughful spectator. While the narrative implicitly hopes that the spectator assumes that none of the members thought of this obvious solution for their conundrum, it would have been better if the impossibility of said solution was touched upon within the narrative.

While this ‘stupid oversight’ will surely make some spectators’ eyes rolling, we do not feel that this oversight collapses the film and destroys the enjoyment of the spectator.