FrightFest Halloween Review – Mag Mag
Directed by comedian Yuriyan Retriever and written by Eisuke Naito (usually a director), this opens like a throwback to the J-horror boom of the turn of the millennium by establishing the legend of Mag Mag – a two-meter tall female ghost in a bedraggled pink dress (with hair over her face yurei-style) who is seen only by the men she fixates on, stalks, declares love for and then kills by sucking out their eyeballs.
In a bathroom-set prologue, Mag Mag does her thing with a youth whose spilled urine spells out the title on the tile floor. Then, in Grudge structure, chapters follow different characters who are affected by Mag Mag and the audience has to puzzle how they fit together – with a solution only arriving in the final chapter. In a knowing bit, Grudge director Takeshi Shimizu is seen on a youtube clip talking about Mag Mag and the possibility of making a film about her. But this is stylistically daring. After a low-key spooky episode in which Mag Mag haunts young sculptor Hiroshi, who has an on-off relationship with a dyed-blonde model, things get less cut-and-dried with chapters told in different styles (one is like a house-share comedy for the influencer set) and repeated rug-pulls about what seemed to be stock characters.
We’re given a possible origin story for Mag Mag in a flashback about a lovelorn ungainly giant schoolgirl humiliated to the point of stepping off a roof by the school soccer star she has a crush on … though this only tells the first half of a story later picked up and elaborated on. For a while Sanae — a shy girl who was devoted to the sculptor but ignored, hinting that the victims are all the subject of some unnoticed person’s adoration – takes on the traditional J-horror role of investigator, visiting witnesses and putting together the jigsaw of Mag Mag’s past rain of terror. But Sanae, who has a smile as disconcerting as Mag Mag’s, turns out to be a richer and stranger character, and even gets a song/dance routine about the object of her obsession.
The narrative skitters away to fresh characters – a bullying husband whose wife sabotages the use of magic sake to fend off the ghost so he gets his just desserts, only for Mag Mag to fixate on the couple’s innocent young son … a hilariously bungled Buddhist exorcism ceremony … a tie-in with a magic tree where malign wishes are pinned to the bark with sickles — and the increasingly twisted efforts of Sanae to use improvised magic weaponry (a pressure cooker bomb, sacred sake steam) to avenge Hiroshi’s death. It undercuts many of the assumptions of the J-ghost cycle and does comic schtick about all those grudge-holding ring-bearers – with a sideline in gross-out comedy ickiness involving all manner of gloopiness and bodily discharge – but remembers to be frightening and affecting in the classic manner.
Discussion
No comments yet.