When Toshikazu Nagae took on the job to bring Masaaki Nakayama’s manga Fuan no Tane, he did not merely want to string various episodes together, but utilize the source material to craft a single story that retaining a kind of fathomless unpredictability, could reproduce the uneasiness aroused in the spectator by reading the manga and do right by the manga’s disquieting atmosphere (コミックナタリー編集部, 2013).
Nagae opens his adaptation with unsettling sights and ominous sounds: a moving truck and a car crashing, unknowingly, moving eyeballs on the highway. The father, driving to their new home in Funuma city, is enjoying the song his wife and their two children, Ryuta and his younger sister Yoko, are happily singing; a song about hating things (e.g. walking, other people). The happiness of the family, however, gets immediately disturbed while unpacking stuff in their new home. The father has an accident. And Ryuta encounters a moving eyeball on landing of the stairs.
Pet Peeve is not so much a traditional horror film, a film that follows one or two characters as they seek to unravel the riddle behind a certain horror, as a narrative that explores an estranging place, Funuma city, via subjects – i.e. Yoko (Anna Ishibashi), Hatano Seiji (Kenta Suga), and Takumi Innui (Kodai Asaka) – who cannot ignore the threats and horrors that puncture and brutally complicate the mundane fantasy of a harmonious societal field – “This town is a weird place”; “Isn’t something strange? In this town, I mean”.
Nagae unfolds the three perspectives in an alternating and chronologically diffuse way, yet also in a manner that allows the perspectives associatively interact with each other – we, as spectator, are led to think we are slowly getting a grasp on the chronology and relations between the various characters. In fact, the way the narrative is structured is one of the strengths of Nagae’s adaptations – it is littered with unpredictable surprises and disquieting nonsensical turns.
However, Nagae’s structure does not erase the anthological rest of the source material. The spectator feels the segmentary nature in the unconnected nature of the strange eerie happenings and the manifestations of horror – e.g. man stuck in the hedge, the woman with straw-basket as a face, the strange shadowy presence/appearance in a dark corner seat in restaurant Moncherie, Yoko and her teapot of jouissance.
As these events concatenate, the spectator is not merely confronted the brutal nonsensicality of the bursts of violence, but with the destructive radicality of what boils and slithers underneath the thin veil of societal peace and erupts through the repressive layer that tries to organize the societal space. Nagae’s Pet Peeve, moreover, offers a nice illustration of the Lacanian Gaze. What imprisons Takumi Innui within his apartment is not so much the shadowy masked presence waiting outside for him, but the fact that this presence functions as the gaze. This presence, this manifestation of a puzzling and oblique desire, radically sabotages Takumi’s ego; the radical inability to solve the question of what he is in the desire of that unerasable stain makes him cling to his bedsheets to ensure the frail consistency of his ego.
In our view, the segmented nature of the source material is both what allows Nagae deliver a narrative that exploits nonsensicality to effectively unsettle the spectator as what causes him to produce a kind of thematic void. Nagae disrupts the consistence of his narrative fabric by disorienting the spectator with his finely delivers traps, yet these traps remain mere devices of horror as they do not harmonize into something that can be considered a veritable thematical exploration – Pet Peeve is a true surface-horror, unsettling but leaving the darkness of the subject or of the societal field largely untouched.
The visual effects within Pet Peeve are quite decent. While an air of artificiality lingers over many of the effects, the spectator has no trouble in suspending his disbelief. The spectator’s ability to do so, however, is not merely due to the decent quality of the effects, but also due the convincing sounds that accentuate their presence within the visual field. To give various effects their finishing touches and amplify their ability to arouse uneasiness in the spectator, Nagae exploits his lightning-design – the erasing power of shadows – effectively and smartly utilizes various camera angles.
The composition holds no surprises for spectators who are familiar with Japanese horror films – a mixture of restraint dynamism, static-shots and some rare shaky framing. Within his composition, Nagae heavily relies on close-ups to frame facial expressions and shots that subtly emphasize the facial expression of the character in question. These shots, so commonly utilized within the horror genre, aim to fleetingly amplify the ‘fearful’ expectations of the spectator: What linger threateningly beyond the frame?
Nagae exploits the long take well within his composition to play with the spectator’s anticipations. As the spectator fully knows he is watching a horror-film, the lengthy stillness of a shot easily acquires an ominous quality – mundane silence before the brutal materialization of horror. While such stillness is, in many cases, followed by a flash of horror, Nagae also inserts moments of stillness within his composition to subtle disrupt the ease the spectator is trying to settle in, to arouse a certain uncertainty in the spectator and signal that horror lurks around every corner. In other cases, Nagae does not rely so much on stillness but on sounds and musical accompaniment to slowly build up a sense of apprehension and prepare the spectator for the horror that might materialize itself.
Toshikazu Nagae sets the mood for his horror narrative by confronting the spectator with a narrative world where dark shadows and greyish colour-schemes reign supreme. Yet, what arouses some uneasiness in the spectator is the element of inconsistency at the level of the colour-schemes: Nagae delivers a strange and unpredictable mixture of naturalistic visuals, monochrome moments, and sudden intrusions of warmer colours.
Pet Peeve offers a pleasant horror-experience that fans of the genre should not miss. While Nagae’s adaptation does not cut thematically that deep, his play with narrative structure and colour-schemes results in a film that is able to unsettle the spectator and leave him guessing as what kind of finale the film is building towards to.
References:
コミックナタリー編集部. (2013, July 5). 映画「不安の種」特集、監督・長江俊和インタビュー&原作・中山昌亮へ9の質問. コミックナタリー. https://natalie.mu/comic/pp/huann-movie?