Page 169 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

156 Nightmare Japan

narratological ‘comfort zone’, safely predicting what image will follow
the one presently on screen. This is not to suggest that Higuchinsky
avoids the familiar logics of classical continuity editing altogether.
Indeed, were it not for his periodic observance of such ‘standardised’
editing practices, his multiple violations of audience expectation would
be nowhere near as disorienting as they are. Consequently, viewers would
not experience the ontological dislocation necessary to fully associate
with the characters’ mystification at the supernatural proliferation of
spiral patterns.
Furthermore, as the film’s action unfolds, the narrative
continually cycles back to several key images, often re-visualising them
in ways that condition our previous understanding of the scenes in
question. As mentioned above, Higuchinsky revisits Shuichi’s father’s
suicide several times throughout the film. The first time we encounter his
death, we do not see what his body looks like within the washing
machine’s tight confines. Later, when Tamura, the police investigator,
visits Shuichi and Kirie, Higuchinsky ‘shows us’ Shuichi’s father’s
suicide from the perspective of a videotape recording made during the
fatal incident. Here again Higuchinsky carefully elides a complete or
stable visual disclosure of the tragic event, focusing the viewer’s attention
instead upon a mirror Shuichi’s father places in the washing machine, and
then cutting to a shot of the investigator’s, Shuichi’s and Kirie’s reaction
to the exaggerated cracking sounds one can only assume is Shuichi’s
father’s bones snapping as his body contorts. Tamura returns to this
videotape later in the film, rewinding and fast-forwarding to moments
that Higuchinsky once again prevents the film’s viewers from seeing.
Thus, instead of witnessing the bizarre suicide, spectators must either
experience it via Tamura’s grimaces, or endeavor to ‘make sense’ of the
event through extreme close-ups of the video footage that disallow
viewers the necessary context a more removed perspective would
provide. Finally, towards the film’s conclusion, Higuchinsky again
returns to Shuichi’s father’s suicide, this time from a perspective
seemingly aligned with Kirie’s gaze. In a POV tracking shot granted
‘realistic’ immediacy through hand-held cinematography, spectators are
finally granted a glimpse of Shuichi’s father’s body wound snake-like