While it might seem strange that a comedian suddenly turns to the art of directing, Yuriyan Retriever is not the first comedian to do so. Cinephiles will readily recall Hitoshi Matsumoto and the four surreal narratives he created – Big Man Japan (2007), Symbol (2009), Saya Zamurai (2011), and R100 (2013).
Whether Yuriyan Retriever will direct more feature films is, as of yet, unclear. However, it is evident that her first feature film, her horror-drama, is a quite personal affair, a reworking of her own romantic experiences into a filmic envelope. Screenwriter Eisuke Naito utilized the agony of unrequired love, the feelings of longing and her one-time obsession she shared with Daisuke Takahashi, her producer, to craft a horror fodder that does right by Yuriyan Retriever’s experience and personality (Aoki, 2026).
Eisuke Naito, in fact, utilized Yuriyan Retriever’s experiences to create a narrative that explores the ravages caused by holding on to the mistaken belief of ‘having the phallus’ – the male pole – or of ‘being the phallus’ – the female pole – and being unable to give place to the perceived lack in oneself or the other – castration. His approach to Yuriyan Retriever’s romantic struggles allows her to thrust the spectator into a brutal theatre of libidinal war – a concatenation of savage one-on-one’s – organized around sexual obsession and male sexual opportunism, but also into a societal field where phallus and father – and the ideals they give rise to – silently continue the oppression of female subjectivity (General-note 1).
Yuriyan retriever’s narrative commences on an ominous night at a high-school. Yusuke (-) following the advice of his friend (-) to brutally reject the female shape that has lingered around him, finally succeeded to make the creepy presence disappear. Yet, not long thereafter, in a darkish restroom, she brutally leads him to his demise.
Not much later, Hiroshi Masuma (Oshiro Maeda), a university student and aspiring sculptor, is approached by Sanae (Sara Minami). Reduced to silence by her intrusive presence, he welcomes the arrival of Rumi (Mai Fukagawa), his model, to snub her and guide her to his sculpture of her – his artistic confession of his love. Confronting with the nudity – her body exposed beyond her wish, she runs away in disgust. Luckily, Rumi soon realizes Hiroshi’s intent and, much to the joy of Hiroshi, patches things up with him. Yet, their happiness is cut short when the pink-reddish-clad dark-haired presence takes his life.
Sanae witnesses the murder of her beloved and decides, despite being radically dismissed by him, to take revenge. Her investigation into the first victim, Takuya Akutsu, immediately introduces her to the possible source of the noroi (curse): Yurika Yoshida (Marina Mizushima), a high school girl who, after putting a written love-confession in Takuya’s locker, was bullied by her classmates and Takuya – ‘just die instead’ – into committing suicide. Yet, revelatory as it may be, it does not explain why the Magmag (Erika Karata) has continued killing.
Yuriyan Retriever pulls the spectator into Mag Mag by thrusting him into an ominous visual context – the darkish shadows attaining a sinister quality due to the musical accompaniment – that culminates in a confrontation with the central logic of the film – Yusuke-kun […] Have you ever heard of [the] Mag Mag [woman]? She’s a female ghost. She haunts the men she falls in love with.
For the male subject, this female spectre realizes itself as a radical Otherness, a presence that exudes Lacan’s parable of the praying mantis, which he introduced in his tenth seminar. The Magmag makes itself present in a way that destabilizes the subject that becomes her victim – the subject loses his bearings and struggles to orient himself within the desire, demands and intentions of the Other. She materializes the all-consuming desire of the Other that subjects her subject to her will – “Anyone she falls for is destined to meet their end. She’ll haunt that man until the day he dies”.
Yuriyan Retriever’s introductory sequence allows us to formulate two orienting questions: Why do certain male subjects become the object-goal of her oppressive and overpowering desire? What can be done to appease the ferocious appetite that she displays?
To allow the spectator to answer these questions, however, we must analyse the ‘monstrosity’ that haunts the narrative spaces and hunts certain male subjects. We can consider, in line of the image of the praying mantis, the magmag as female Otherness radically undone of its imaginary veil, as the materialisation of the horrifying repressed that lies beyond the phallic veil upon which the game of romance is teasingly played.
Yet, what does this tangle of transgressive desires and vengeful fantasies manifest itself? Time and time again, we see the magmag appear after a female subject’s subjectivity has been radically effaced, after she has been turned into a trash-object to serve the self-serving pleasure of a male subject and their unconscious fixation on societal ideals, e.g. the discourses of phallic beauty. In this sense, the magmag arises on the scene as a haunting chuck of libidinal thirst (jouissance) that seeks to confront the male victim with ravaging impact of his dismissive acts and silencing signifiers (Psycho-note 1).
Following this reading, the spectator has no difficulty in understanding what kind of act and signifiers calls forth the pulsating death drive, twisted sexual libido, in the shape of the dismissed female Otherness. In the case of Akihito (Joe Kujo), for instance, it seems highly likely his opportunistic toying with Yui (Akari Takaishi), his girlfriend, and Hina (Rina Saito) and Haruka (Yua Shiraishi), whom he has sexual escapades with, is what turns him into Magmag’s target – the effect of exploiting the female subjects within the share house as mere supports for his sense of phallic desirability – i.e. the fantasy of being the best director.
Mag Mag establishes, within its first half-hour, that a brutal refusal of the presence of this monstrous Otherness – “Don’t come, don’t come”; “Impossible” – indisputably leads to an equally brutal death. Acceptance of her thirsty advances, on the other hand, leads to insanity. So, how can the magmag be counteracted?
Yuriyan Retriever is very focused on getting her thematical message across in Mag Mag and stage it in all its brutal glory. This focus, however, eventually strains the dramatic flow of the film. While each segment within magmag fulfills its thematical function, staging the different faces of tragedies that can befall a female subject, the concatenation of these segments results in a rather surprising a-dramatic flow – a series of traditional J-horror elements that create a pleasant, yet frail harmony.
Due to her thematical emphasis – segments take precedence over the flow of the whole, Yuriyan Retriever slowly steers the film away from being a pure horror, transforming it into an eerie drama about father, phallus, and the way a woman positions herself with regards to the patriarchal system and its disregard for female subjectivity. For spectators hoping to feast on another straight-forward horror, such atmospheric shift will surely disappoint, yet this shift also allow the director to deliver a touching, yet also deeply cynical finale.
It is evident from the way Yuriyan Retriever composed her narrative that she, despite trying to utilize the tools of the J-horror box in her own way, colours safely within the compositional lines established by the masters of the J-horror boom.
To paint her moments of horror on, Yuriyan Retriever establishes an atmospheric frame by instrumentalizing the static shot rather than by exploiting retrained dynamism (Cine-note 1). Rather than evoking the intrusion of a horrifying Otherness and the way it perforates the mundane, she seeks to emphasize the subjective effect of the intrusion of the real – the inhibition, the paralysis, the uneasiness, the shattering of the ego. Through her use of subtle shaky framing, she seeks to stage the anticipatory fear that marks both the subjects within the frame and the spectator that finds himself, indirectly, subjected to a similar position.
The director also employs other ways to evoke the destabilisation of the ego, for instance, as an effect of the signifier. In the case of Hiroshi, she relies on a fleeting moment of compositional flourish to stage the disruptive effect of Sanae’s question concerning the model of his sculpture.
She bathes her narrative spaces in ominous shadows and darkish colour-schemes and thoughtfully manipulates the spectator’s expectations with disconcerting musical accompaniment to disquiet the spectator with the infraction of sudden sounds (i.e. jump-scares) and verbal repetitions and by turning him, just like Mag Mag’s male victims, into a passive frozen witness of the materialization of the Real of enjoyment (i.e. disruptive images of horror and threatening sound-decorations).
However, Yuriyan Retriever does not merely seek to shock the spectator with visual horror but always tries to infuse a subtle sense of twisted black-comedy in the way Mag Mag turns her beloved subjects to mere sacks of meat and blood – i.e. Yusuke’s spraying pee all over the restroom. There are other moments within Mag Mag that attain, for instance due to musical decorations, a twisted light-hearted touch.
Mag Mag delivers everything that makes conventional J-horror pleasant, but in a bit too a-dramatic way. Yuriyan Retriever, by putting too much emphasis on the individual segments that structure her narrative, does not only deliver a narrative that is a tad too long, but also obfuscates the main narrative thread and its emotional flow. The finale, while offering a satisfying conclusion, ends with a highly ironic note, equating a moment of subjective growth with an indirect condonement of the way male subjects, by inscribing themselves in the traditional discourses, treat the female subject and her subjectivity.
Notes:
Psycho-note 1: It is not difficult to explain why Mag Mag targets, first and foremost, the eyes of her victims. The dismissive signifiers the female subject is subjected to makes the ideological discourses of the Other omnipresent and turns the eyes of those who surround her into its physical supports. The eyes that glance at the bullied subject, which grants certain ideals an oppressive quality and emphasize the subject’s radical failure to accede to these ideals, imprisons her into the position of waste.
General-note 1: The finaleofMag Magallows us to formulate two important statements: the use of the curse functions as an affirmation of the helplessness that certain subjects fell towards forcing change within the societal field. And, certain female subjects are more than willing to support the ravages of a patriarchal societal system that overvalues the imaginary phallus, the discourses surrounding desirability.
The second statement gives the ‘liberating’ clash between the two faces of Yuriyan Retriever – Sanae and Mag Mag, its cynical truth. The finale stages both an overcoming of a mental struggle as well as an affirmation of the field that produces such conflicts and ravages.
Let us note that Yuriyan Retriever also consider the film as dealing with personal growth and that Eisuke Naito’s creation of Sanae reflected elements of her own, her selfishness and her childishness (Aoki, 2026).
Cine-note 1: While Yuriyan Retriever utilizes restrained dynamism within her composition, the dynamism tends to remain in function of the character – there is a clear preference for tracking dynamism over spatial dynamism. As the moving camera remains fixed on the character, she is able to retain her compositional focus on the destabilisation of the character’s ego, while heightening the anticipatory tension evoked through the retrained nature of the dynamic shot.
Spectators, however, will have no problem in discerning the staples of horror-cinema – i.e. the slow zoom-in and zoom-out movement – in her composition.
References:
Aoki, G. (2026, January 15). Interview: Yuriyan Retriever. Time Out Tokyo. https://www.timeout.com/tokyo/film/interview-yuriyan-retriever