When the Japanese turn their eye to horror, you’re always going to get something weird, be it the analogue terrors of The Ring or the goofy bloodletting of the likes of Tokyo Gore Police. However, while the differences in Eastern and Western culture guarantees that their output is consistently eccentric, when filmmakers from the land of the rising son want to go really weird, you certainly feel it.
This brings us to Uzumaki – also known as Spiral (not to be confused with the Spiral movie released in 1998 that originally was the unofficial sequel to The Ring) – Higuchinsky’s adaption of Junji Ito’s deliriously strange Manga that plays like the love child of David Lynch and Tim Burton geared themselves up to indulge in a spot of trippy J-Horror.
Will you know what’s going on and why? Not a chance. But there’s enough weaponized strangeness here to comfortably put you in something of a spin…
On her day to day routine of high school, running though weirdly empty streets and getting bike rides from her sullen, sort-of boyfriend, Shuichi Saito, student Kirie Goshima has noticed increasingly strange happening occurring in her home town of Kurouzu-cho. It starts when she notices Shuichi’s father crouching in the street, excitedly filming the spirals on a snail’s shell that kicks off an obsession that soon grows into something more sinister.
As his near-psychotic interest in the titular pattern reaches critical mass, certain changes start to come across his physical body and sanity that starts with quitting his job and amassing a huge spiral collection and ultimately ends with him killing himself by climbing into a washing machine. However, his outlandish, twisted corpse isn’t the end of it as the influence of the shape spreads. In the aftermath of her husband’s death, Shuchi’s mother becomes deathly afraid of spirals, going so far as to slice off her finger prints and hair, a boy at school seems to be slowly transforming into a snail, while a female student starts growing an outlandish, curly and seemingly sentient, hairstyle based on the sinister pattern.
While Kirie and Shuichi try to figure out what the hell is happening, they get help in the form of a reporter, Tamura, who attempts to do a deep dive on this freakish phenomenon.
However, it already seems to be too late, and as the spiral related happenings begin to claim more and more fatalities, our two, lead, teens realise that it’s probably too late to leave this cursed town.
As the smoke from the local, overworked; crematorium makes a spiral of smoke in the sky which features the screaming faces of the recently dead, Kirie and Shuichi wait for the fateful curse to twist their minds and bodies out of existence.
Sometimes you watch a film that’s so unapologetically weird, that you can’t help to be riveted to the screen just to see what happens next. It doesn’t matter that you instinctively know that nothing will be adequately explained, and in conventional terms, the film isn’t actually that great, but the bizarre tone and eerie atmosphere more than make up for the fact that, like a spiral itself, the film gradually keeps turning inward without end, exactly like the shape that everyone loses their mind over.
Taken in this respect, Uzumaki is something of an intriguing watch. I wasn’t particularly scared or horrified and I didn’t feel much empathy for the characters stuck in this circular nightmare – but for sheer oddness, I kept my eyes locked in the screen simply because I wanted to know what was going to happen next. I guess I’ve always liked the concept of a town slowly succumbing to some sort of indefinable evil that warps reality like John Carpenter’s In The Mouth Of Madness, or Lucio Fulci’s City Of The Living Dead, that patiently unknits logic and physics to a surreal degree. On top of that, Uzumaki, also has a nice line in Salvador Dali-esque moments of body horror that are as absurd as they are creepily artful.
While Junji Ito’s source material obviously had way more room to gradually lead you into such concepts as students gradually turning into snails or the sight of a man using a washing machine to twist his entire body into a fleshy coil, Higuchinsky’s only has ninety minutes to play with and after a steady build up, pulls the trigger on the uncanny set pieces at regular intervals. To his credit, it proves to be pretty memorable as, aside from the random fuckery involving snails and revolving household appliances, there’s a nicely varied sense to the insanity that keeps it from becoming samey. A students curls become so large they radiate out from her head like a tree in an illustration from a Dr. Seuss book; a kid runs out in front of a car only to be twisted around the front axle like a grinning pretzel while the skull of the unfortunate driver leaves a spiral-shaped crack in the windscreen; and most extreme of all, we witness a victim succumb to the curse as his bones and joints turn to taffy and he literally contorts himself to death right before out very eyes.
And yet, despite all of this, Uzumaki doesn’t grip you anywhere near as tightly as Hideo Nakata’s Ringu or Takashi Shimizu’s Ju-on, two films renowned for bringing actual horror to the horror movie. While these unmitigated titans of J-Horror slow burned you to a state of high anxiety before nailing you with some of the most genuine scares of all time, the curious plight of Kurouzu-cho and its twisty residents remains watchable mainly because the imagery is so staring and it’s all so peculiar and you want to see how it all turns out. You won’t particularly care about any of the characters or their meager arcs, you’ll just wait to see what cartoonishly Cronenbergian fate awaits them next.
Maybe it’s that pesky culture divide that’s blocked Uzumaki from truly getting under my skin and I’m just not getting the full force of the scares in the way that’s intended because I’m not understanding the metaphors, but while my attention was fully locked on the movie and its uneasy tone, the sight of a long hair woman crawling out of my television of a ghostly child appearing above my bed who makes cat noises are far scarier than a Lovecraftian curse that makes you eyes spin like a concussed Daffy Duck.
The film is definitely worth a watch for anyone who likes their horror weird and wobbly, but for those looking for more straightforward scares might find find that Uzumaki puts their head in a spin.
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