Reviews

The acting is very good (though I think it was a mistake for the family of the dead girl to be played so dispassionately), and the night-sky and nature footage is often fantastic. In general, all the technical aspects were well done (except the mediocre ghost effects) but all it amounts to is a lot of well-done stalling to hide the fact they only had about 10 minute's worth of story.

The movie tells you what's going on and what to wait for in the first minute. The next 45-minute obvious red-herring is a very uninteresting ghost story. Well done, but dull. Once you find they've wasted your time with that, the film ostensibly tries to make it up to you with 20 minutes of gratuitous, unnecessary and ultimately irrelevant revelations about the girl's life. It soon becomes obvious that this too is only here to pad out the film's run time.

When the good idea introduced in the beginning finally comes up, the reason for all the padding and stalling becomes clear: The idea is concise enough that it doesn't take much time to explain, and the approach the filmmakers took in telling this story made it impossible to dramatize in any effective or satisfying way. So the audience would have been better off stopping after the first minute because the idea isn't explored any more than that anyway.

Unfortunately, once all is revealed, the movie STILL keeps going and going even though it has nothing important to add. It throws a bunch of supposedly revelatory ghost photos at you in the end credits, but at this point they can only evoke a big "so what?" because their redundancy renders them insignificant.

So all the separate technical elements of the film are like nicely painted puzzle pieces that fit together to make such a boring picture that you end up regretting having wasted your time watching it being put together.

The most obvious and important thing to keep in mind while watching Marebito is that the audience experiences everything from the main character's point of view. However, Masuoka is NOT having delusions. To really see through his eyes, you have to know where he's looking.

Masuoka is a man out of balance and incomplete. He's emotionally empty and alienated from other people. He's not alive in what he does. He experiences life only artificially through the eyes of his video cameras and by taking the antidepressant Prozac. Masuoka says he's recorded UFOs, ghosts, and other phenomena but they don't interest him. Those are "known" mysteries. He spends all his time looking for the "unknown," the thing that's missing. Then one day he catches a glimpse of it in the eyes of Kuroki, a terrified man who commits suicide in the subway. Suddenly realizing the answer lies on the inside instead of the outside, he embarks on a quest to find the source of Kuroki's terror.

To begin, he stops taking Prozac; he's casting off the Band-Aid to treat the real wound. From this point on, the audience is accompanying Masuoka on an inward journey into his subconscious. To Masuoka, this takes the form of a descent into the tunnels beneath Tokyo and reveals his inner landscape to be a vast "Hollow World."

The ghost of Kuroki, who Masuoka meets in the tunnels, explains another reason to use Shaver's Hollow World mythos as a backdrop: He says that when Shaver wrote it, it was fiction, but when people read it, it became real. Masuoka is going down into the collective unconscious, home of the archetypes present in us all. Here he finds F, a pretty, naked girl imprisoned in a small cave.

Chained, pale, and without a voice in the middle of this metaphorical empty cavern, F personifies Masuoka's anima, his underdeveloped and neglected emotional/feeling side. The English "F" doesn't stand for Fuyumi -- that's a red herring -- it stands for feminine (i.e. anima). He takes her back and hides her in his apartment, but his intentions throughout the film are to nurture and care for her. That's important.

F is only awake a few hours a day. She needs Masuoka to give her his blood (life/vitality) to drink so she can fully awaken, but he keeps holding back. He only lets her have a little or else substitutes other blood for his own.

All the characters Masuoka talks to during this ongoing journey are manifestations from his subconscious. Notice he encounters them all in cave-like settings (did you catch "deep" written large on the wall at the bathroom murder scene?). He doesn't literally kill anyone. He's facing his own personal "Deros," defined as the flawed, deformed robotic elements that advanced people leave behind. His actions on the surface are no more physically real than the Hollow World is underground. The murders are a kind of personified psychoanalysis. Remember, we're seeing everything from Masuoka's point of view, and he's looking inside himself.

Early on, before he descends into the depths, Masuoka sees a woman in a window and says he saved her soul by filming her, that is, by recognizing her existence. That's what he's doing throughout much of Marebito. He's recognizing the elements at work inside his psyche that caused him to withdraw from others. In doing so, he's trying to save his own soul. He takes away their life so F might live.

But change is difficult. He gives up and leaves F sleeping in Shinjuku and retreats to the safety of distance. After he's been away from his camera for a while (i.e., back in the real world), he starts thinking about getting a job and rejoining society. He's reverting to the way he was: rational, unfeeling and robotic. Then Kuroki's ghost appears at the seashore to remind him of the splendor of the depths.

Masuoka admits his supposed madness was only a pretense for opening himself up to the terror he seeks. He says he understands that he killed his wife and treated his daughter like an animal, but he's speaking figuratively; he's accepted his previous failures as a husband and father. Putting these ghosts behind him (like in the elevator) enables him to go back to find the terror Kuroki describes as true wisdom.

On his way, he spots the Deros, whose stated role is to "take people back into the depths." He checks in on the phone-camera they bring him and is surprised to find F waiting in his apartment, but the picture on the screen is his own. This leads to the satisfying, upbeat conclusion.

Masuoka's final letting go is a victory. If F represents his anima/emotional side, then finally giving her what she needs to thrive frees them both. Seeing his own picture on the phone means he is at last able to integrate this buried aspect of himself into his personality. The terror of the unknown is his fear of opening up emotionally, and experiencing this terror means becoming an active participant instead of an outside clinical observer -- it's the terror of living.

Cutting open his mouth, he fully commits to giving F all the blood/vitality she needs. When she feeds, it looks like a kiss. They're devouring each other to become one.

The Masuoka that F leads back underground is the formerly dominant unfeeling aspect of his psyche that carries a camera as its totem. F is awake now, and she gives him a peaceful smile that's the opposite of his look of terror.

One of the last shots in Marebito shows Masuoka and F lying together in the cave, his black clothes curled opposite her bare white skin. This is a yin-yang symbol. A union of opposites. Together, these two forces at work inside Masuoka are finally in balance and complete. Inner harmony has been achieved, and his Hollow World isn't quite so hollow anymore.