Uzumaki (2000)

Reviewed by Matt
Posted on September 5, 2005
Filed Under Asian movies, Weird

It’s probably fair to say that Uzumaki is one cult Japanese horror movie that’s not going to be remade by Hollywood any time soon. If anything, the film is a fair benchmark of how different Western and Eastern cinema cultures really are: despite being probably the most wilfully odd movie I’ve ever seen, it was a sizeable mainstream hit in Japan, suggesting that the Japanese cinema-going public are more than open to material this extreme.

Kirie Goshima is an ordinary school girl living in the small town of Kurozucho. She’s confused over whether her relationship with childhood friend Suichi Saito is a romantic one or not, but Suichi’s distracted by concerns of his own. His father has driven himself mad looking at spirals, filming snails and looking at pottery for hours on end. Suichi thinks that spirals could well end up dooming the town, and events start to confirm this: a boy at Kirie’s school throws himself down a huge spiral staircase and dies with a smile on his face, while another boy seems to be turning into a snail. As the body-count rises, events get more nightmarish, and it soon becomes apparent that Suichi and Kirie need to flee Kurozucho before the whole town spirals away…

The debut feature by music video director Higuchinsky, and based on an incredibly popular Manga series, Uzumaki’s probably a film of selected appeal. I was tempted to look for allegory or meaning, but there isn’t any - the spirals, quite literally, are the threat, and it’s unclear what causes them or what they are. For the first half hour, I was unsure where the film was going; it shares the same eccentric, small-town atmosphere as a lot of Jeunet and Carot films, especially Delicatessen, but I didn’t find the characters of Kirie and Suichi particularly compelling or sympathetic. That the film is a success is down to Higuchinsky’s astonishing use of the imagery; spirals gradually saturate every part of the movie, objects and people, and when the camera starts to spiral round its subjects as well, the film takes on an utterly oppressive nightmare quality. By the end, you’re rooting for the two main characters simply because they’re our only anchors of normality as everything else falls apart.

My other concern at the start was that the film wouldn’t pack any emotional punch, but this too proved to be unfounded. As Kirie, Ericko Hitsune’s range isn’t that impressive, and excess emotion isn’t really her forte, but she’s helped by the material; although the spiral threat is surreal and intangible, its consequences are real - as the array of blood-spattered bodies testify. Suichi’s mother is hospitalised because of her fear of spirals, and this leads to several shocking scenes, including one where she cuts off the tips of her fingers so she doesn’t have to look at her spiralling fingerprints. Kirie’s reactions to events are understandable - she hasn’t got a clue what’s going on, nor the faintest idea what to do or how to help Suichi deal with his imploding family. This desperation provides the film’s human heart. Equally, the twee photo album scene early in the film is redeemed by the gradual overloading of spiral images later on; compared to what follows, the flickery scenes of children playing feel refreshingly ‘clean’.

Uzumaki also shares Delicatessen’s grotesque sense of humour, mixing the witty with the disturbing. Suichi’s father’s horrific death (spinning around in a top-loading washing machine) is probably the best example, but the snail scenes are great as well: Kirie and her friends only notice there is something wrong with one of their classmates when he starts walking increasingly slowly, only comes to school when it rains and is covered in a thick layer of slime. Later, as more kids are transformed, one boy is seen circling answers on a multiple-choice exam paper with increasingly spiral-like markings whiles drinking bottle after bottle of water. The final scenes, as the completely-transformed boys crawl up the sides of the school while the girls coo at how pretty their shells are, are incredible. Uzumaki’s extreme surrealism may offer little emotional resonance, but its shocking images and human sense of desperation mean that once the spiral attack is underway, it’s never just a sterile exercise in visuals. Baffling, beautiful and disturbing, it offers no answers and poses even fewer questions, but rewards adventurous viewers by lingering in the memory after the spiralling closing credits have rolled.