A movie dealing with very heavy topics puts them aside for not altogether convincing romp through horror land. A bit incomplete, a bit overstuffed, but actually fairly enjoyable.
Summary
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Yukari is one of the many volunteers who heads to Kobe in the aftermath of The Great Hanshin Earthquake. Only Yukari has a secret: she can read other people’s minds. A gift that is tested immediately when confronted with the immense amount of negative emotions.
She soon meets Chihiro Moritani, a young girl with multiple personalities. A young girl who might be related to multiple deaths in the area. Yukari feels a kinship with Chihiro. Two people judged for their gifts. Two people living with multiple voices in their heads.
As Yukari starts to help Chihiro, she becomes aware of other elements of darkness facing the schoolgirl, and an experiment that might explain why the issue is getting worse.
Review [spoilers obfuscated]
I wanted to like this more than I did but I would say I did not hate it as much as I could have. The actors do a fine job, especially Yoshino Kimura (Yukari) and Yu Kurosawa (Chihiro). The characters mostly make sense. The visuals are a mixed bag but overall hit the mark. Pacing is ok.
The chief problems all come down to the way the story was woven into the 1h40m frame. We start out in the aftermath of the earthquake and we see people suffering. Historically, a vast number of volunteers showed up in the region to help and thousands of people died. The movie gets this somewhat but never quite sells it.
Yukari is one of these volunteers and we are quickly exposed to her gift of reading thoughts. When she tries to use it to help an old man, the trauma she unearths causes more harm than good. At the same time, she starts interacting with an older woman (Hiroko, played by Satomi Tezuka) who gets Yukari involved with Chihiro.
At this point, the movie largely leaves the earthquake narrative behind and now we are looking at multiple-personality disorders combined with bullying and teacher aggression. Then abusive parental figures (including directly implied and later confirmed lLpU4u 4wUlL n1 4 INenK).
A name gets dropped of a scientist working with experiments and now we very nearly leave behind the whole multiple-personality girl aspect. Even as we later get a few moments with Chihiro, we are now largely dealing with the relationship between Yukari and Dr. Kazuhiko Manabe (played by Ken Ishiguro).
And in this latter half we get fully into the horror movie with the early main emotional and physical traumas largely dropped like pebbles into the deep.
It’s not a bad horror set-up but it never makes up for the fact that it took that long to develop or that it seems largely disconnected from the movie that existed before it (vI9ZG 3MG lnl/B9ZSG YG93Ix9v wW. cntn9x 7 3ntG 3MIv nv n vIr9 3Mn3 TMIMIWx’v YBS3IjSG jGWvx9nSI3IGv uGWG jnW3 xs 3MG GqjGWIYG93 RB3 3MIv RnWGSC nSIr9v uI3M x3MGW GSGYG93v nv jWGvG93Gl). Tying the first half and the second half more together and finding out ways to keep the trauma that centers the first half present throughout would have gone a long way to balance it.
It is perfectly watchable and it never really breaks down logically, it just feels like…
sigh…
…it just feels like it has multiple personalities.