The Mouths
Director: Takashi Shimizu
Writer: Masahiro Yamaura
Cast: Rihito Itagaki, Momona Kasahara, Keito Tsuna, Ai Yoshikawa
Takashi Shimizu is one of J-horror's greatest artists, the mastermind behind the Ju-on franchise and its American remake, The Grudge. His standing in the horror world is not in question, which means he's got a certain creative freedom to play with the genre in new ways. It's perhaps surprising, then, that he's going back to familiar territory with The Mouths.
Or at least, it seems that way at first. Like Ju-on and its assorted sequels and spinoffs, The Mouths is a film that begins as the story of a curse, and the people caught in the wake of that curse. But this is not Shimizu running back to familiar territory. Instead, The Mouths is an exercise in subgenre excavation, as one of Japan's finest horror minds approaches the themes that made him an icon in surprising, terrifying new ways, giving us one of the best new horror films of the year in the process.
The story begins with the simplicity of a classic urban legend: Four college friends learn about a supposedly cursed tree at the edge of an old cemetery, and decide to head out and search for it. We learn the story of these friends as we follow them out to the cursed tree, but also through interviews, as each major character – Shota (Rihito Itagaki), his girlfriend, the possibly psychic Mirei (Momona Kasahara), his best friend Tatsuya (Keito Tsuna), and Tatsuya's girlfriend An (Ai Yoshikawa) – relates what happened when they finally found the tree, and what it's done to them since.
Shimizu builds out this scenario beautifully, steeping his tale in classic Gothic tones with decaying, neglected gravestones, gnarled trees, and the evocative power of darkness. For maximum tension, when the friends make it to the tree, they decide to go in and encounter it one at a time, which precipitates a fragmentation of their bond when things start to go wrong in their lives. It also allows Shimizu to build a kind of horror Rashomon, as each key character tries to find clarity in their story, a corrupt police detective chases down clues, and other young people with access to the tree add their own encounters to the mix.
So far, we are still in familiar territory with Shimizu films, and his style is still second-to-none in the realm of Japanese horror. He's lost none of his ability to generate tension, to deliver frightening ghostly encounters that both leap into your face and creep around the edges of the frame, and to keep us glued to the screen with first-rate ghost story pacing. After decades in the game, you get the sense that Shimizu could conjure up a lot of these elements in his sleep, but that does nothing to diminish their power. In fact, it primes us as an audience for what's going to come next, which is anything but predictable.
The Mouths is adapted by screenwriter Masahiro Yamaura from the novel A Questionnaire About the Mouth by Sesuji, and indeed opens and closes with a framing device that actually forms a kind of questionnaire for the audience. It's deliberately disorienting, and forces you to contemplate elements of the film on the way out the door which mean it'll linger in your head even longer. But beyond the framing device, The Mouths builds a narrative that's both viscerally unnerving and intensely cerebral.
It starts with the title. What is a mouth for? Breathing? Speaking? Consuming? We can choose, at any given time, but once we've decided that we are consumers – of food, of information, of each other – we may never be able to stop, and that is the true nature of a curse. It extends backwards and forwards through time, corrupting our relationships and our minds and our souls, and it's made all the more horrifying because curses are, quite often, things we invent. Like the urban legend at the center of its story, The Mouths is a story about a curse, but just like the legend of the cursed tree, a story can become something more with the right amount of belief. A curse can spread beyond its borders with the right quantity of human energy behind it, and through labyrinthine plotting, wonderful character work, and intense horror sequences, Shimizu's film explores exactly what that means for these young people, and for us.
The Mouths is a triumph, a glorious expression of J-horror at its best, and an essential new horror film from a legend in the genre. See it as soon as you possibly can.
The Mouths is coming soon, with a US release date still TBD.
