Inshite miru: 7-kakan no desu gêmu [The Incite Mill] (2010)

(In French, On Cable TV, August 2021) Modern anxieties know no frontiers, and considering that “protagonists are unwitting participants in a Dark Web snuff show” has quickly become a 2010s horror cliché, it shouldn’t be surprising if the Japanese got there first in 2010 with The Incite Mill. Here, we have a few strangers walking in a strange facility and being told about the rules of a detective game. But don’t fret: Before long, the detecting focuses on actual murders, and the protagonists discover that (drum roll) they are unwitting participants in a Dark Web snuff show. As far as the narrative is concerned, The Incite Mill is messy — in-between the game organizers, traitors in their midst, opportunists and clearly defined protagonists to cheer for (plus a robot and an unexplainable Native American figurine explaining the rules of the game), director Hideo Nakata does lose control at times, never playing fair with the mystery nor being all that interested in rigour when there’s an Internet murder show to feed. I did like that, while the characters are often stereotypes with maybe one layer of complexity, they’re Japanese stock characters, meaning that they at least offer something more than Anglosphere films. (I particularly liked the older characters — both Katahira Nagisa and Kitaoji Kinya seem to ground the film in the middle of several younger characters, and that’s something I wouldn’t mind seeing in other horror movies.)  Still, it doesn’t help that The Incite Mill follows the usual narrative trajectory of bad-to-middling horror films: Beyond the intriguing premise, it can’t quite do justice to its own ideas and becomes more conventional in terms of structure, meaning that the beginning is vivid but the ending is forgettable. Perhaps slightly more thriller than horror (and that’s a good thing), The Incite Mill is certainly watchable, although not exceptional.