Imagine if the internet wasn't actually a tool for establishing meaningful connections with one another that we all obviously know and agree that it is but was just another, newer, digital form of the terrifying existential isolation and mortality we've felt from the very beginning........ haha........ unless? Think I'm gonna need to come back to this one because it's a very good depiction of ghosts as a lonely invading force of inescapable depression but it didn't quite get under my skin the same way Cure did even though it definitely borrows much of the same trancelike atmosphere, stillness and sense of societal decay/sickness infecting those around you, and as demonstrated by the ending is intending a very different feeling I wasn't expecting of this film that borders on romantic, or at least some sort of acceptance or comfort. That being said no one's mise-en-scène game is as strong as Kurosawa with lots of haunting, carefully composed space in the dingy, rotten apartment complex interiors, while the exteriors are shot like these concrete/steel labyrinths that dwarf characters in this alienated modern living, and the ghost-in-the-machine use of screens, shadows and CG here makes the digital qualities of this at once tangible and unreal which adds a very unsettling layer to many of the already eerie, surreal horror sequences.Full discussion on ep 274 of my podcast SLEAZOIDS.
