Kôrei (2000) (TV)

Director:

Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Writers:

Mark McShane (novel)
Tetsuya Onishi (teleplay) ...

Release Date:

12 May 2001 (Japan)

Genre:

Drama | Horror | Thriller

Plot:

A psychic housewife and her husband become burdened with a kidnapped girl who escaped her assailant...

Plot Keywords:

Haunt | Ghost | Police | Psychic | Doppelganger

Awards:

2 wins

Cast

Kôji Yakusho	...	Sato
Jun Fubuki	...	Junko Sato
Tsuyoshi Kusanagi	...	Hayasaka
Hikari Ishida	...	Junko's customer
Kitarô	...	Detective
Ittoku Kishibe	...	College professor
Ren Ôsugi	...	Restaurant customer
Shô Aikawa	...	Shinto priest
Daikei Shimizu	...	Tazaki, sound engineer
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Hajime Inoue
Shiuri Isobe
Michisuke Kashiwaya
Masahiro Toda
Megumi Wakabayashi
Ryûji Yamamoto

Also Known As:

Seance (International: English title)
Seance (Ko-Rei) (Canada: English title)

Runtime:

118 min | Switzerland:95 min | Argentina:98 min (Buenos Aires Festival Internacional de Cine Independiente)

Country:

Japan

Language:

Japanese

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

1.37 : 1

Sound Mix:

Dolby SR

Certification:

France:U | Argentina:13 | Singapore:PG

Company:

Kansai Telecasting Corporation

Movie Connections:

Version of Seance on a Wet Afternoon (1964)

What is far worse than seeing ghosts

There are two kinds of films in the world, my friends. Those in which it is easy to find a meaning (if possible, a moral one) and those which tell a story with such devices that you, spectator, are free to construe it. Seance is such a film. I for one do not see it as a horror or a crime movie. It has the required number of supernatural events, but what is far more frightening than that is the subtle psychological illness that affects the two hapless heroes, Junko and her husband. These two are completely hollow — the husband filled with noises, the wife with ghosts indeed ; they very simply do not live on the same physical plane as other people (colleagues, patrons... and the young girl who gets trapped in the husband's case) and it takes two extremely gifted actors, Yakusho and Fubuki, to convey this hollowness, this muted remoteness, as they are conveyed here. Kurosawa does not make any redundant comment on that stupendous hollowness : he merely shows it ; that indeed is his job as a filmmaker. The result is, in my opinion, one of his best films, together with Bright Future and Doppelgaenger. For yes : the doppelgaenger variation which one or two of the other commentators find so irksome (unfairly so, in my opinion : the eager student who mentions the apparition of a doppelgaenger in someone's life as a sign of impending demise isn't right* ; in literature the thing has been plaguing many a cheerless Romantic and postromantic hero for years) is back in Kurosawa's latest full length feature, Doppelgaenger (there is a Japanese DVD with English subtitles). No important message in that wonderfully quirky, eerily violent comedy (Yakusho again plays the double part). Let us rejoice about that fact : as long as a film puzzles more than it scares, it will never be remade in Hollywood.

* And he shouldn't be believed any more than the misleading psychiatrist in Cure, should he ?