As veteran director Kiyoshi Kurosawa observed when he spoke at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan last year, the problem with today’s digital imaging technology is that it’s too darn clean. Even the cheapest cameras produce relatively pristine results; “gritty, grainy images don’t exist anymore,” he lamented. That’s a slight overstatement, but when it’s possible to make a blockbuster with an iPhone — as Danny Boyle did for the upcoming post-apocalyptic horror “28 Years Later” — filmmakers who want it grotty typically have to turn to obsolete formats.
The low-resolution visuals of VHS play an integral role in “Missing Child Videotape,” becoming an embodiment of dark forces that lurk just beyond the limits of our comprehension. Ryota Kondo’s debut feature takes inspiration from urban legends and “The Blair Witch Project,” while showing that its director has learned well from the masters of Japanese horror, Kurosawa included.
The titular videotape seems like a nod to Hideo Nakata’s “The Ring” (1998), although Kondo’s characters spend much longer watching the tape than it took for that film’s central spook to crawl out of a TV screen. In rough, wobbly footage, it captures the moment 13 years earlier when protagonist Keita (Rairu Sugita) saw his younger brother, Hinata, vanish during a game of hide-and-seek in an abandoned building.
When the adult Keita sits down to watch it with his roommate (and probable boyfriend), Tsukasa (Amon Hirai), the director lets the video play for nearly 10 minutes without cutting to a reaction shot. What seems like an exercise in testing his audience’s patience turns out to be crucial in establishing the film’s mood, which is spooky rather than outright scary. It’s all about ambient dread, heightened by creepy sound design and a musical score that’s more of a subliminal presence.
Suzuyuki Kaneko’s screenplay doesn’t skimp on eldritch moments, as Keita and Tsukasa return to the site of Hinata’s disappearance: a mountain forest that’s been used as a dumping ground for funeral urns and other unwanted spiritual baggage. Just for good measure, Tsukasa has extrasensory perception — something he casually mentions when he first meets Mikoto (Kokoro Morita), a reporter who tags along for the ride. The film also finds uncanniness in the imperfections of analog media: not just video but also an audio cassette left behind by a group of hikers who vanished in the same area.
“Missing Child Videotape” is based on a short film that won top prize at the Japanese Horror Film Awards in 2023 and bears the imprimatur of “Ju-on” creator Takashi Shimizu, who’s credited as overall producer. However, Kondo’s slow-burn approach is likely to frustrate genre fans hoping for a few good jolts. A sequence in which Mikoto gets thoroughly freaked out while sitting alone in a car at night masterfully builds the tension, only to fizzle out rather than go in for the kill. The brief appearances of ghostly apparitions are more liable to induce a shrug than a shudder.
The most effective scene is a simple two-hander, in which a minor character (played by comedian Tomohiro Sekimachi) explains the lore surrounding the cursed mountain. By working the imagination rather than relying on callbacks to the golden age of J-horror, it taps into a deeper fear than any of the paranormal happenings. Yet there’s no denying the chill that lingers in the air after the film is done.
| Rating | |
|---|---|
| Run Time | 104 mins. |
| Language | Japanese |
| Opens | Jan. 24 |
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