Uzumaki
(A.K.A. うずまき, Spiral )
(2000) 90 Min.
Rated: N/A (Slight Gore)
Country: Japan
Director: Higuchinsky
Stars: Eriko Hatsune, Fhi Fan
Links: IMDB | Wikipedia
Rating: ★★☆☆☆
A small town is slowly going crazy over spirals.
Synopsis:
Kyrie Goshima (Hatsune) is a high school girl from a small town named Kurouzu. As she is on her way to school one day she stops and sees her boyfriend’s dad, Toshio Saito, staring through a video camera at a snail on the wall. She is surprised and decides not to disturb him. She sets off to school.
She tries to talk to Shuichi Saito (Fan), her boyfriend, about the fact that she saw Toshio Saito, his father, filming a snail. He is troubled and tells her that his father has become increasingly obsessed with Spirals. He asks her to leave the town with him, but she doesn’t.
Toshio Saito visits Kyrie’s house to talk to her father, Yasuo. He is a pottery maker and Toshio is filming him make a bowl on a pottery wheel, noting the spiral shape it has. He asks that Yasuo makes him a large platter with a large spiral. Kyrie happens to overhear the conversation.
The next day she goes to school with her friend Chie. As they are climbing a spiral staircase one of their classmates falls from the staircase to his death. Everyone screams. Afterwards, Kyrie is coughing in the bathroom when a group of girls exit the stalls. When their leader, Sekino, remarks that if you are not noticed, it’s like you aren’t alive. She says she wants to be seen in the truest possible way.
After school, Shuichi remarks that it was a spiral staircase and that he’s felt increasingly sick of being in the town. He gets physically dizzy from riding his bike through the tunnels.
At home Toshio demands more narutomaki (Spiral-shaped fish cake) in his miso soup. He grows increasingly frantic about spirals. The next day he slaps Shuichi’s mother for tossing out Toshio’s sprial collection. He declares that spirals are inside one’s self. And he starts to spin his eyes, causing a visiting Kyrie to faint from fright.
One day when Yasuo finished the platter, Kyrie delivers it to the Saito household, however no one seems to be home. She wanders into the washroom and screams when she opens the washing machine. Though not shown, Toshio has apparently died from twisting himself inside the machine.
The Saito household is devestated. Shuichi’s mother, Yukie, begins to loathe all spirals to the point that she is put in a hospital and begins to destroy spirals on her fingertips. She cuts her hair. Finally she is told, by her husband’s ghost that a spiral is inside her. She realizes that all humans have cochlea inside their inner ear and proceeds to stab her ear.
Tamura, an investigator, starts to do research about the town and finds information regarding Dragonfly Pond, which is at the center of town and how “mirror”-covered artifacts, another word for spiral, were found at the bottom of the lake, created centuries earlier. He, however, dies in a car crash that creates a spiral on his windshield, also killing Kyrie’s stalker, by wrapping him around the car’s wheel in a spiral pattern.
A news reporter starts to remark on the strange events in the small town. Everyone at school has slowly turned into snails. Arrogant Sekino has curled spiral hair that moves of its own accord.
After viewing the report, Shuichi tells Kyrie that he wants to leave the town, but Kyrie goes looking for her father. Shuichi follows her, but it seems he, too, is succumbing to the spiral curse. His body starts to twist slowly until he can no longer move. Kyrie cries for him telling her that he promised he’d never leave her. His head turns and tells her to join him in the spiral. Organ music plays in the background as Shuichi rises up like a snake and attacks Kyrie who screams. The scene fades to black.
A few still shots are panned over as the movie reveals the fates of a few characters. A police officer shooting a spiral hole in his head, Sekino’s got tangled in electrical wires and she died, the news reporter and her crew all turned into human snails and Shuichi is shown twisted on the floor dead.
The film ends with Kyrie’s voice over saying she wants to tell a story about her town Kurouzu, just as she did when the movie began.
Review:
I will start by saying that I read the manga by Junji Ito, also titled Uzumaki. This film was not very much like the books. It tried to keep a humorous tone in the film at first.
A lot of the film had comical over-dramatic acting which reminded me of Hausu. Except this film tried to be more serious and, I feel, failed. There wasn’t enough build-up of tension. Many scenes left out the action where characters just described what happened later on.
Much of the film seems to be on a very low-budget. This includes panning over still painted photos, synthesized music and poor special effects. And this is not to say that low-budget alone makes a bad film, but it seemed to make the experience that much more painful to watch.
I suppose I was somewhat looking forward to seeing this film, but they left out a lot of scenes, the over-all tone was different than the manga. I have enjoyed other Japanese horror movies, this just happened to not be very well done, in my opinion.
Note:
The movie was filmed before Junji Ito’s manga was finished, thus it doesn’t follow the same conclusion of the manga.
This is a first film for video director Higuchinsky.