Three years ago, Kadokawa brought the Japan Horror Awards to life, a competition aimed at discovering young and upcoming directors and giving the winner a chance to turn their screenplay into a feature film. That Kadokawa’s composition is fulfilling its promise is proven by the previous winners. Yuta Shimotsu surprised audiences with Best Wishes To All (2023) and Ryota Kondo delivered a refreshing slow-burn horror Missing Child Videotape (2024).

Psychoanalytically speaking, Eriko Katagiri’s When You Open The Door aligns itself with Kondo’s film to breathe life into the Freudian idea that our unconscious is the site of all our desirous darkness. Yet, Katagiri’s film has a different thematical aim; she seeks to question feminine isolation and alienation within the Japanese societal field through the well-established horror-logic of the return of the repressed, Japanese folklore (Itako, the gehōbako, and the rite of kuchiyose), and the gothic image of the werewolf (Culture-note 1).   

Katagiri’s narrative commences when Miki Harayama (Serena Motola), after exiting a konbini with her lunch, accidently drops one of her breads. Yet, before she can pick it up, it stands up and rolls away. She follows it into a dark underground passage and, from the shadows, a wolf-like presence brutally attacks her, leaving two biting-marks in her neck.

Yet, when she divulges what happened to her colleague and they want to tend the wound, Miki discovers the wound is gone – as if nothing happened. As the sole proof of the attack is gone, even her boyfriend (-) has trouble to believe her story. Miki, however, soon exhibits disconcerting changes. Some time after her mother, during a phone call, reminds her that she, as a child, once told the same story, Miki, much to her surprise, receives an invitation to a moon-waiting gathering.

Before commencing our reading of Eriko Katagiri’s narrative, let us remark that the title of the narrative works well in arousing the spectator’s interest because the unfinished sentence confronts him with a signifying void – meaning is left in suspense – that produces three interlocked questions: Where is the door (tobira)? What kind of door will Harayama face? And, what lies behind it?  

To be able to lift the veil from the film’s thematical dimension, we must commence by analysing the compositional envelope as Katagiri calls forth her themes through compositional play and the delivery of visuals, by relying on a more indirect and evocative way of presenting signifiers. We, as spectator, experience Katagiri’s thematical exploration by being subjected to the way she allows her composition to play with us.  

Katagiri opens her narrative by introduces the spectator into a narrative space that, despite presenting itself as radically mundane, is already infested by a threat that is not-yet able or not-yet allowed to manifested itself. The director signals the mundanity of her filmic atmosphere by focusing on framing mundane acts (e.g. Harayama’s morning routine) via a simple compositional combination of static shots and restrained dynamic moments.

Yet, by ‘upsetting’ her composition with visual elements (e.g. a sporadic shaky shot, the use of unconventional extreme close-ups) and auditive elements (e.g. auditive repetition) that do not neatly fit its mundane inclination, Katagiri signals that the mundane is frails and ever able to be punctured. The mundane is most evidently disturbed by the subjective intrusions – imagery welling up from Harayama’s unconscious, from the andere shauplatz where her repressed dances in various shapes – and the framing of the various changes instigated by the bite.

The clearest way in which Katagiri foreshadows an unmanifested ‘threat’ is by letting shadowy darkness invade her visual frame and letting it organize or accentuate the tension between the compositional lines. The darkness, whether subtly present or in a pervasive way, presents itself to the spectator as a still (and easily dismissible) threat, yet Katagiri signals with Harayama’s dream that the dark stillness might hide a breathing presence. In a more evocative way, she lets the spectator wonder whether the threat is external – shadow as signal of the intrusion of an external threat – or internal – shadow as a reflection of what threatens the subject from his unconscious.  

These initial explorations allow us to conceptualize Katagiri’s cinematographic approach as follows: she seeks to lull the spectator into a sense of peace by emphasizing the mundanity of the narrative space, yet disrupts her attempt by visually hinting at the mendacious and frail quality of this mundane frame and exposing its radical defensive aim. Both tendences are present right from the beginning. One sequence that illustrates this is when one of Harayama’s colleagues addresses her. What presents itself as a mundane interaction attains a disconcerting quality due to Fujisaki’s seductive whispering and Harayama’s radical silence. However, this failed interaction does not only stage the frailty of the societal fiction, but also underlines that Harayama struggles to function as a support of the mundane frame (Narra-note 1, Narra-note 2).    

It is not surprising that when the threat manifest itself that Katagiri relies on the similar compositional elements (close-ups, emphasis on shadows, …) to stage its intrusion. The dynamic way in which she combines these elements and the ominous and threatening musical accompaniment she employs do not merely temporarily shatter the mundane, but also underline the disorienting effects of such shattering on the ego.

However, Katagiri also relies on subtle mysterious musical pieces (and the manipulation of the diegetic sounds) to emphasize the way the bite slowly rips Harayama away from the mundane field inhabited by others. Yet, even without any musical indications, it is evident that the various changes she is subjected to complicate how she experiences herself in relation to her surroundings, how her experience ousts out the reality of the mundane.

The impact of Katagiri’s compositional play on the spectator is that he feels thrusted into the question of Harayama’s unconscious truth – What do the incongruous images signify? How to read the puzzling signifiers? Katagiri re-affirms the centrality of this riddle by letting the spectator wonder how this bite is related to what bubbles up from unconscious, to what forces itself through her preconscious. The mother, a wolf-like presence? The father, an absent failure to signify the unfathomable desire of the mother? Her own repressed truth of being a being-of-jouissance, a searcher of ‘oral’ enjoyment beyond the dimension of needs?     

The spectator, however, is not merely introduced to this orienting question, but also confronted with a frame that undermines his ability to quickly decide on one interpretation and dissipate his lingering uneasiness. Katagiri’s opposition of two conflicting realities – the ‘mundane’ reality of others and Miki’s subjective reality – subtly puts the emphasis on fantasy, the frame that determines how we experience our body and interpret our surroundings, and the real, that element beyond sense that forms the kernel of our phantasmatic endeavours and around which our drive circulate to generate pleasure and enjoyment (Psych-note 1, Cine-note 1, structure-note 1).

Katagiri, moreover, contrasts the mundane reality and the reality of the bite to explore how the subject relies on signifiers to give sense to a real event and how an exchange of signifiers, giving rise to a shared signified, forms community, etching out an appeasing place for the subject. The film, in a certain sense, underlines that the signifier is the prime vehicle through which a subject can accede to self-acceptance – accepting the truth of one’s being.  

Katagiri utilizes the same contrast to trace out the way the ‘intrusive’ leaking of the reality of the bite into the world of the mundane troubles Miki’s boyfriend and his perception of her and the reality they share together. Yet, the director does not stop from sabotaging any support that allows the spectator to determine, with pacifying certainty, where factual reality ends and the phantasmatic overlay begins. This play with real and fantasy, however, helps staging the birth of Miki’s truth in a disconcerting, yet deliciously satisfying manner.

When You Open The Door is a rare treat that blends fairytales, gothic imagery, and folk religious practices into a compelling and visually arresting exploration of forced self-discovery. Eriko Katagiri proves, moreover, that she is able to play with the grammatical dimension of composing to evocatively stage her themes and ensnare the spectator from start to finish into her narrative. Another fresh voice in Japanese horror arises; long live, J-horror. Recommended.      

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Notes

Culture-note 1: To offer some orientation, allow us to provide brief explanations of the following terms. Itako or Ogamisama is the signifier used to denote (nearly) blind women who after going through severe ascetic practices and wedding a patron deity supposedly become able to communicate with kami and spirits of the dead.  

The rite of kuchiyose [caller with the mouth] is the ritual to call forth either spirits (shinikuchi), living people (ikikuchi) or kami (kamiguchi) and letting them utilize the mouth of the necromancer/medium to speak.  

The gehobako, which means literally box outside Buddhist law, is a box that contains secret items that tend to be representative of the personal protective deity, the patron kami.

Narra-note 1: That Harayama struggles to function as such a support is emphasized by the way she, on her way home, loudly repeats the ‘repaired’ version of the event. This repetition, beyond re-staging the pleasure of recognition, also arouses a sense of uneasiness and re-emphasizes that she does not really fit within her mundane frame.   

Narra-note 2: Katagiri creates contrasts within the narrative to tremble the frame of the mundane, contrasting, e.g. the way Harayama is ignored around lunch-time with the collective worry they express after she returns late, the silence of Harayama with the brutal laughter of the doctor she visits, and to seemingly re-establish the mundane – e.g. the confusing disappearance of the bite-marks.

In some rare cases, she also plays with unexpected visual/narrative repetitions.

Psycho-note 1: By the same virtue, fantasy is the frame through which our unconscious seeks to signal its presence.

Cine-note 1: We would say that Katagiri, with her compositional approach and the way she utilizes music and sounds, seeks to emphasize the disruptive effect of realizing that one’s subjective reality diverges from the mundane reality of others.    

Structure-note 1: Eriko Katagiri also adeptly utilizes narrative ellipses to further complicate the spectator’s attempt to interpret the concatenation of estranging events.