Creepy ghosts in everyday settings are a J-horror staple. But what if the same dwelling is populated by two pairs of seemingly living humans, neither of whom is aware of the other? How is that is even possible, unless one pair is actually, if unknowingly, dead, a la Bruce Willis in "The Sixth Sense"?
That is the conundrum posed by Yui Kiyohara's "Our House," winner of the Grand Prix at last year's Pia Film Festival. A recent master's graduate of Tokyo University of the Arts, where she studied under horror-meister Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Kiyohara does not go as far as her celebrated sensei with the otherworldly weirdness. In fact, the film has little to suggest horror beyond its unusual setup and its unsettling atmospherics (a Kurosawa specialty).
To a commercially-minded producer, this ambivalent stance might suggest timidity: Having shaken her audience out of its grass-is-green complacency, Kiyohara is reluctant (or unable) to deliver the scares of a good genre exercise.