Directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa • 2001 • Japan
Kumiko Aso, Haruhiko Kato, Koyuki
In Tokyo, a group of young people begin to experience strange phenomena involving missing coworkers and friends, technological breakdown, and a mysterious website that asks them, “Do you want to meet a ghost?” After the unexpected suicides of several friends, three strangers set out to explore a city growing more empty by the day, and to solve the mystery of what lies within a forbidden room in an abandoned construction site. Featuring haunting cinematography by Junichiro Hayashi, an unsettling tone that lingers long after the movie is over, and an ahead-of-its-time story that anticipates twenty-first-century disconnection and social-media malaise, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s existentially terrifying vision of contemporary alienation is one of the greatest and most terrifying achievements in modern Japanese horror, and a dark mirror for our contemporary digital world.
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