There was, in a certain sense, only one director fit for directing the adaptation of Sesuji’s popular novel, About A Place In The Kinki Region. Not only did Kei Kushiyama, the producer, pitch the project because its form reminded him of Shiraishi’s J-horror classic Noroi: The curse (2005), but Sesuji wrote the novel as a ‘love letter’ to Shiraishi’s classic and the hidden answer he hid within his film.
Yet, while Koji Shiraishi felt he was the right man for the job, he had to figure out a way to transform the textual investigation into an audio-visual form. He and his team ultimately chose to combine a conventional dramatic approach with found-footage – the drama would function as the frame to introduce the documentary sequences. Sesuji collaborated with the script, providing them the ‘truth’ behind the otherworldly phenomena, yet also insisted that they did not let his novel constrain them. We must, in this sense, consider Kinki (2025) not as a straight-forward adaptation, but as a filmic version that stands on its own – that stands next to the novel. Yet, does Shiraishi’s version deliver a satisfying horror-experience?
Koji Shiraishi opens his film with a murmur of rumours on social media and a troubling online video where Chihiro Seno (Miho Kanno), visibly shaken, tells that her friend has gone missing and she welcomes all information that might lead to his whereabouts. The friend she is seeking is none other than Sayama (Atom Shukugawa), an editor-on-chief at Bunei publishing house, who disappeared along with his wife and his research material.
The video is part of the help she is giving to Ozawa (Eiji Akaso), Sayama’s younger colleague, to complete his colleague’s assignment for the Beyond The Supernatural magazine – the survival of the magazine depends on it. However, having no clue what Sayama was writing about, Seno and Ozawa start digging through the little research material he left behind.
Koji Shiraishi captures the spectator’s attention, from the get-go, with a simple yet highly effective narrative contrast between what the spectator knows and the initial ignorance of the characters. The director establishes this contrast via three steps – the introduction of the rumours concerning an urban legend, the framing of the horror that befalls Sayama, and the ignorance by which Seno and Ozama commence their investigation – and the spectator, ensnared by this contrast, cannot but feel the seed of anticipatory fear budding. We, who have seen the horrifying outcome of Sayama’s investigation, are pushed to exploit the characters’ ignorance – They do not realize the horrifying threat that awaits them – to be able to feast on our burgeoning anticipatory fear.
However, the spectator’s anticipatory fear also clings itself to what the spectator, just like Seno and Ozama, does not know: the logic of the horror, the mystery surrounding the curse. Neither spectator nor any character has any inkling as to how to ward off or pacify the imminent otherworldly danger. Shiraishi, thus, invites the spectator, able to anticipate the bursting forth of horror, to become a partner of Seno and Ozawa, to function as an (absent) investigator of the unresolved mystery.
With this set-up – as effective as it is, Kinki resembles many classics of the J-horror-genre where the investigatory impulse pushes the unknowing subject into the field of horrifying jouissance. Yet, rather than taking the spectator along a journey throughout Japan to uncover the disconcerting tangle of transgressive jouissance, Kinki confronts him with a series of video-fragments Sayama left behind.
The first clue Seno and Ozawa are given concerns the mysterious beckoning call: ooii. For the spectator, however, the repetition of this call reminds him of three questions to guide himself with through the narrative: What elicits its call? Who is its address? And, why is it addressing? We are, clinging to these questions, thrown into a fragmentary investigation featuring a demolishes suicide house with a bolted door and decorative nooses, a proliferation of Shide (zigzag-shaped paper streamers) ominous hand-drawn ofuda (talisman) throughout Japan, a peculiar Shinto shrine, mysterious videos, selective disappearances, an ominous game called Mashiro-sama, and a local legend concerning Masaru and his persimmons.
The prolonged vagueness concerning the three orienting questions allows the director to keep his audiences in a state of subtle gnawing uneasiness. Moreover, his refusal to associate all the various elements together into a harmonious explanation installs narrative gaps that, quite effectively, amplify the brutality of certain intrusions and the harrowing effect of sudden excesses of otherworldly or criminal jouissance.
This refusal also delivers the first sign that Shiraishi’s Kinki, despite sharing a similar premise with other narratives within the genre, tries to surprise the spectator and deliver a something different resolution. We willingly fall in the trap of the riddle of the monstrous desire and blind ourselves to the monstrous radicality that love, in certain cases, can attain. With Kinki, Koji Shiraishi does not seek to confront us with an otherworldly jouissance that demands some kind of recognition from the Other – the logic of the onryo, but with the transgressive potentiality of love, with the destructive finality of a demand made by a subject brutalized by loss (Structure-note 1).
Despite narratively indicating that Kinki is a horror film – the rumours of a mysterious curse (norio), Seno’s friend’s disappearance, Shiraishi does, initially, not allow his composition to support this indication. In other words, he opens his narrative with a rather straightforward concatenation of static and dynamic shots to deceptively introduce the spectator into a space of down-to-earth drama.
The sense of drama, as anyone readily suspects, is nothing more than a deceptive frame of mundanity that awaits its own puncturing, rippling, and subversion. It, thus, comes to not surprise that Shiraishi, just as the spectator starts to feel at ‘home’ within the dramatic atmosphere, starts disrupting the down-to-earth quality of the dramatic ‘space’ and interweaves threatening intrusions – visually as well as aurally – into his visual fabric. He disturbs the mundane atmosphere of investigation by inserting ominous restraint dynamic shots and inserting disruptive visual intrusions (e.g. flickering lights) as well as by arousing uneasiness by making silence overly present or by amplifying a sense of imminent menace with a non-diegetic auditive decorations (Cine-note 1).
In the first half of the narrative, Shiraishi interweaves many documentary-like sequences (e.g. the tv-program concerning Keiko Yamashina’s disappearance, the footage of the mass-hysteria at Kuramoto Junior High’s summer camp, the footage of motorcycle touring, Totsugeki Hitobashira (Kisuke Tsukomo)’s live stream, … and so on) into his investigatory drama (Structure note 3). The contrast between mundane drama and faux-documentary does not merely infuse a subtle sense of ‘reality’ to the horror we, as spectator, already witnessed in the beginning and are anticipating to be subjected to in the second half of the film, but also allows the spectator to momentary flee from the horror – the space of transgressive jouissance – into the mundane space of investigation. However, as the narrative unfolds, the spectator is increasingly confronted with the intrusion of the former into the latter, the mundane space of the investigation calls forth its own disruption by the transgressive space of horror. However, the mundane space does quite surprisingly not collapse.
The continued separation between mundane drama and the space of horror, ultimately, ends up undercutting the delivery of the finale. However, it is not, like some will argue, the spectator’s ability to anticipate the twist that deflates its drama, but his ability to escape the confrontation with the excess and dissipates his uneasiness in the moments of mundane framing. Shiraishi, despite proving to be a masterful conductor that plunges audiences and his characters with ease into the realm of horror that lies beyond the mundane drama of every-day life, yet seemingly forgets to take the spectator by its throat in the finale.
Shiraishi decorates his composition with effective musical accompaniment. The non-diegetic sound-scape exploits the dull reverb of the drums to signal the imminent nature of a threat, the oppressive bass-rich bellowing/chanting and sinister bass sounds to signal one’s entry in the space of horror, and the re-occurrence of ritualistic Shintoistic bells to echo the ‘hidden’ presence of the Otherworldly, of what lies beyond our frail fiction of mundane peace and always seeks to threaten to puncture it.
With Kinki, Koji Shiraishi offers a pleasant horror-experience that successfully plays with the spectator’s expectations yet he forgets to create a truly satisfying finale – a finale that imprisons the spectator and brutally explodes the transgressive potentiality of love into his face. The narrative structure is the film’s biggest strength, yet ultimately also turns to be its own enemy. Even so, we would still recommend Shiraishi’s adaptation to fans of the director and those who love a good J-horror narrative.
Structure-note 1: Some spectators might feel disappointed by the somewhat subdued ending. Yet, the way Shiraishi ends his narrative does succeed in confronting the spectator with the very moment he stepped into the narrative’s trap.
Structure-note 2: Some spectators might struggle to accept with Ozawa’s blindness towards the transgressive radicality of love, yet structurally speaking his ignorance installs another contrast – between the spectator’s suspicion and Ozawa’s trust – to enflame his anticipatory fear.
On another level, should we not consider Ozawa’s blindness as resembling the spectator’s blindness? Does the ending not confront us with the ease by which we step into deceptions, in our willingness to believe – to corroborate our frail interpretations, and our reluctance to put things radically into question? Are we not played as much as Ozawa has been played?
Cine-note 1: What allows Shiraishi to disrupt the field of mundane drama with subtle indicators of horror so smoothly is the continuity at the level of the lighting and colour-design. Shiraishi creates a pleasant dramatic atmosphere with his darkish lighting design and the subtle washed-out dullness that defines the film’s colour-schemes.
Structure-note 3: In the second half of the film, Shiraishi transforms the passive position of the spectator – we merely watch the video-fragments – into an active ‘gaze’ – our gaze coincides with Ozawa’s hand-held filming. This shift amplifies the uneasy dread the spectator feels as certain imagery we ‘passively’ witnessed in the basement turns into imagery we are witnessing ‘live’.