This was the last movie I saw at TIFF this year. For some reason, tickets were still available 2 hours before show time - wow! Seeing "midnight madness" movies in the middle of the day is always a little weird, but I had no regrets after Buppah Rahtree (billed in the festival as "Rahtree - The Flower of the Night").
The plot is a weird amalgam of The Exorcist, Misery, Audition (the TIFF audience, no stranger to Miike's films, caught this similarity immediately), and the typical high school romantic comedy plot (albeit at university). These influences come together to make a unique horror comedy romance, bookended by voice overs that are far too melodramatic.
Rahtree starts out looking like an artsy take on a story we're all sick of by now: a young man, rich and cocky, manages to bed a quiet, studious girl who turned down the most popular guy at their university ... just to win a bet. Immediately afterwards, he starts to feel guilty, but nonetheless he changes his cellphone number and takes pains to avoid the girl (the titular Buppah Rahtree). Two months later, he apologizes, and tells her that he's going off to grad school in England. She tells him she's pregnant. With the help of his rich parents, they get her an abortion. Then, somehow, she dies.
This is where the plot started to bother me. How did she die? Her "ghost" later is seen crying and screaming in her bathroom as she bleeds from ... well ... let's just say from where her abortion was. So apparently she was fine after the abortion but bled to death from it a day or two later? Hmm. Another character notes all the old books in her apartment, so personally I thought maybe she had sold her soul to the devil to get revenge, especially since the film is full of Exorcist references. In The Exorcist, Regan was POSSESSED, she was not an angry ghost.
**SPOILERS IN THE NEXT PARAGRAPH**
There is also a sort of plot twist very near the end of the film which confused the heck out of me. Suffice to say there's another ghost and it is living in its original physical body as if nothing has happened (unlike Buppah's ghost who tends to just keep its body in the closet). Where did this second ghost/body come from and how did it make it all the way to Buppah's apartment? And why does it not seem to know it's dead? (Buppah even permanently injures it and ties it to the bed (that scene is the big Misery/Audition reference) - how can you do this to a ghost?)
All told, the plot has some problems and the dialogue is often weak (there's too much reliance on swear words for humour), and yet I enjoyed this movie, because it looks and sounds great, and it's quite funny. Director Yuthlert (who was very amusing in the Q & A session after the film) clearly has a lot of talent. I just think he could use some help with his scriptwriting.
The plot is a weird amalgam of The Exorcist, Misery, Audition (the TIFF audience, no stranger to Miike's films, caught this similarity immediately), and the typical high school romantic comedy plot (albeit at university). These influences come together to make a unique horror comedy romance, bookended by voice overs that are far too melodramatic.
Rahtree starts out looking like an artsy take on a story we're all sick of by now: a young man, rich and cocky, manages to bed a quiet, studious girl who turned down the most popular guy at their university ... just to win a bet. Immediately afterwards, he starts to feel guilty, but nonetheless he changes his cellphone number and takes pains to avoid the girl (the titular Buppah Rahtree). Two months later, he apologizes, and tells her that he's going off to grad school in England. She tells him she's pregnant. With the help of his rich parents, they get her an abortion. Then, somehow, she dies.
This is where the plot started to bother me. How did she die? Her "ghost" later is seen crying and screaming in her bathroom as she bleeds from ... well ... let's just say from where her abortion was. So apparently she was fine after the abortion but bled to death from it a day or two later? Hmm. Another character notes all the old books in her apartment, so personally I thought maybe she had sold her soul to the devil to get revenge, especially since the film is full of Exorcist references. In The Exorcist, Regan was POSSESSED, she was not an angry ghost.
**SPOILERS IN THE NEXT PARAGRAPH**
There is also a sort of plot twist very near the end of the film which confused the heck out of me. Suffice to say there's another ghost and it is living in its original physical body as if nothing has happened (unlike Buppah's ghost who tends to just keep its body in the closet). Where did this second ghost/body come from and how did it make it all the way to Buppah's apartment? And why does it not seem to know it's dead? (Buppah even permanently injures it and ties it to the bed (that scene is the big Misery/Audition reference) - how can you do this to a ghost?)
All told, the plot has some problems and the dialogue is often weak (there's too much reliance on swear words for humour), and yet I enjoyed this movie, because it looks and sounds great, and it's quite funny. Director Yuthlert (who was very amusing in the Q & A session after the film) clearly has a lot of talent. I just think he could use some help with his scriptwriting.