‘Re/Member’ is a new japanese horror movie released in Netflix based on Welzard’s ‘Karada sagashi’ manga, a live action that does not follow the current trend of turning the source into a series or two movies, but works, at least for now, as a uniform story. Although Asian horror cinema has been regaining popularity in recent years, this has not been enough for a renaissance of horror films in Japan.
Indonesian cinema with Joko Anwar and Timo Tjahjanto is leading a new movement that also includes the Philippines, even Taiwan, which has started strong with ‘Hex’; South Korea is not like 10 years ago, but it still offers good movies, but strangely enough, Japan has not been very successful these years, despite the fact that that country had become synonymous with the horror genre in the 2000s, with the label J-Horror to define films that even came from other places.
‘Re/member’ has not come to change the situation of Japanese cinema, but it is a welcome improvement in a few years in which only the film ‘It Comes’ (2018) has been really remarkable. This film adaptation is the latest iteration of a story that has already been told in a variety of media. It started in 2013 with a series of web toons that became manga, and in 2017 there was a very short anime adaptation, with 10 episodes of 3 minutes each. Now, the fourth version lasts 100 minutes.
Trapped in time with murders and monster
The manga didn’t have anything too new, but it did give uA terrifying alternative to ‘Caught in Time’ relatively unpublished, as the concept was seen in the harrowing ‘Salvage’ (2006) even before the manga, which used the time warp trope where characters have to relive a day over and over again, but with blood. The comparison with ‘Happy Death Day’ in particular is obvious, since in both cases the time loop is caused by violent death, but Blumhouse’s seems more like an exploitation of the manga concept and is much more timid.
As is often the case, something has to be done to bring the endless day to an end, and here the ambiguous title gives a clue. The film opens with Miko Onoyama, an 8-year-old girl being brutally dismembered by a man. Thirty years later, Asuka (Kanna Hashimoto), a student ignored by others, finds that not making friends is the least of her problems when she begins to experience strange occurrences. She, along with five students from her institute are selected by a dead student who asks them to “find her body”.
The six are summoned at midnight to the institute and the search for the members begins, but until the cadaver is completed, students are bound to repeat the same day from scratch every morning, in an infinite loop. But it’s not that easy, every night they are being stalked by a “Red Person”, a girl soaked in blood who doesn’t waste a single moment before brutally killing them. The movie doesn’t mention the rules but it more or less follows the ones explained in the manga, making the journey more enigmatic and with an internal logic that we learn intuitively.
Juvenile horror with solid rules and gore
In the vein of ‘Gantz’ and other fictions of the style, ‘Re/Member’ is the classic Japanese violent youth fiction with clear rules and a repeating scheme, and here the hook is that the various members of the group begin to remember and put aside your differences to work together. So, there’s a nice balance between the adolescent bond of ‘The Club of Five’ and the two-dimensional horror of ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street 3’, using various supernatural slasher tropes. The first hour is a riot of carnage and gore, with music video-style montages finding jagged body parts.along with explicit deaths that horror comedy seems to embrace.
At the beginning of the film there are visions worthy of Junji Ito and the prosthetic makeup used for the ghost is also commendable, with a mouth in the style of the vampires from ‘The Strain’ and a very grotesque design, typical of new monsters from internet drawn by Trevor Henderson. The film reflects the underlying message that to achieve success, they must work as a team, solving the feeling of loneliness in their lives, which opens the doors to a lot of teen drama and naive, somewhat cheesy traits about friendship.
Pastel music creates those well-intentioned moments that make sense in their own way and create conflict that works narratively, but the contrast with the blood is pretty wacky and it will bring out many. Although the idea of mixing both concepts and tones is something that only the Japanese could do, and it’s not so different from what turns a delirium like ‘Hausu’ (1977) into a cult film. ‘Re/meber’, without being an essential film, is a pleasant surprise for viewers without prejudice towards the tropes of youth cinema and a possible saga begins —watch out for the post-credits scene— with which to resume the love for Japanese horror in live action and, why not, with the local Netflix proposals.