Hideo Nakata

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

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

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (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.

  • Ringu 2 [The Ring 2] (1999)

    Ringu 2 [The Ring 2] (1999)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, May 2020) Considering that I am one of those strange people who think that the American remake of The Ring is better than the Japanese original Ringu, you may safely disregard my opinions about its sequel Ringu 2. But here goes anyway: There are two giant traps in which horror movie sequels can fall, and Ringu 2 manages to hit both of them at once. The first is to redo the first film with a bigger budget; the second one is to expand the mythology, provide answers, add backstory and generally make a mess out of the simplicity that worked so well in the original. Combining the two means that re-threading the first film’s scares is not original, while what’s original is not that scary. Ringu 2 is not without some merit, but it’s ungainly, off-key and just plain insipid when it tries to weld its own additional ideas on the framework built by Ringu—like a rickety addition to an elegant building. Now, director Hideo Nakata does have a rough understanding about how to build a horror sequence, and that instinct probably saves Ringu 2 from an even worse assessment—but the result still isn’t particularly good, no matter whether you’re watching this on its own, or as a follow-up to one of the most highly regarded Japanese horror films of the 1990s.