Masaki Kobayashi could have made his "horror" film, Kwaidan, simply an expression of style, of the incredibly detailed sets and carefully timed- even meditative in execution and graceful- cinematography, of the actors succumbing to the world they're in with their perfectly modulated reactions to seeing what shouldn't be real but is there in front of their faces. It could have been production over substance, but thankfully this is not the case. Kobayashi, first and foremost, is a born storyteller, and with Kwaidan he's crafted four stories that may not exactly horrify in the sense of real post-modern horror; for those who think it might be just another 3 Extremes or something will be disappointed in a lack of overwhelming gore (albeit Miike's segment possibly comes closest to the sensibility of Kobayashi's).
It is mood and atmosphere, so much atmosphere you can occasionally cut it with a knife that it's so thick. But it's a mood of patience with the story, of letting the turns and conflicts come at such a pace that is just about right for traditional Japan. In fact, this may be one of the purest expressions of what is purely 'Japanese' in storytelling; in expressing fear and honor, faith and belief, love and loss and memory, ceremony and 'classical' music, and what is both painful and, oddly, optimistic about the afterlife. While each of the four stories told- Black Hair, Woman in Snow, Hoichi the Earless, and In the Tea- aren't altogether perfect, with the moment once every so often that might drag even with the intended pace, one by one they build to a staggering effect.
The first two stories are more or less about love, how one loses the one he loves to go up in status as a samurai and how another is spared by a ghost in a blizzard only to find the woman he marries and has children with years later may be the *same* women (or the same something). These first two are told in essence somewhat conventionally, but its only in the structure. What becomes interesting is how the actors use the spaces their given, and how Kobayashi directs them through these very dark innards of the house or riding fast on the horse and seeing a vision back to his wife; or the vision in the snowstorm of a giant eye at the far end of things, the icy blue that encompasses Nakadai's character and the woman swearing him to secrecy. Somehow Kobayashi makes the predictability of Nakadai's wife being the ghost besides the point; it's about the more personal, ethereal aspects to this struggle, which are met with a staggering amount of tenderness and tragedy.
In fact, there seems to be a current of tragedy running through these stories. When treated seriously enough, death and ghosts can bring tragic terms for an audience, and this is no less than relevant in the other two stories. Here, Kobayashi does something a little more interesting as a storyteller: the Hoichi story could potentially be considered a short feature, not simply a short, as it's the longest at a little over an hour; the last story about the images in the tea, however, is intentionally the shortest and meant to be a comment on storytelling itself- how mortal an act it actually is, in a weird way. This first story, with the blind Hoichi, actually brought a tear to my eye at one moment at the climax of the story (without spoiling it directly one can see it right on the cover of the DVD), as it had at its core a tale of innocence shattered by the presence of ghosts of old (it should also be noted the battle scene on the war-ships is exceptionally staged in being *apart* of a noticeable artificial setting of orange backgrounds).
And the last story, about a swordsman who sees a man reappear from his tea glass to seemingly in front of his eyes, and the conflict that ensues with him and the ghosts 'representatives', represents a surprising ending point. What is it to believe what you see, and to even come to accept that there's supernatural forces at work? Somehow, almost in spite of everything being precisely and deliberately staged at the Toho studios, with every ounce of money possible put into these sets and costumes and color schemes, and the fact that the actors (all of them excellent to one degree or another, including the blind Hoichi and the angered spirit of the 'wife' with no sandals), everything Kobayashi does feels real on some internal level. It operates a helluva lot more believably than most films about ghost stories, and in the framework of an art-house picture it is a work that is unequivocally, seriously and wondrously, eerie. Kwaidan is the work of some kind of master artist. A+
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