Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Loft

One of my first festival films was Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Charisma at the ripe age of fourteen, and it nearly put me off festival films forever. By turns confusing and frustrating, it starts off as a gritty policier, then haywires into the forest with a heartwarming redemption fable before kamikaze-ing into a bleak apocalyptic ending. In between Kurosawa throws in some bizarre imagery (the premise is about a man’s love affair with a tree that threatens to poison the world with its very existence), shady morals and gruesome violence – all much too overwhelming for a young mind not yet shaped on foreign film. But the film did strike something in me, it made me so repulsed and maddened that I swore off Kurosawa’s name, afraid that his free-form messiness will corrupt (just as the tree in the film) my sacred image of cinema.

Five years later I was queuing up for tickets for Bright Future on an impulse. Don’t ask me why.

It seems, by his latest potboiler Loft, that he hasn’t changed much as a director – he still works with plots that feel as scattered as sticks thrown into the air and left to fall; he holds the same contempt for the audience, cajoling then revolting against their expectations; and he still remains as bewilderingly unforgettable as ever. The audience I was watching the film with were howling in laughter at some scenes and whistling impatiently at others – unsurprising, since though Loft goes under the guise of a supernatural horror, it feels much more like a bizarro underground avant-garde feature made to satisfy his hardcore fans (I’m not one of them, though).

Most of the time, though, Loft feels very much like a horror movie gone wrong. Not bad horror – bad horror are horror movies that try to scare things up a certain way but end up tickling the audience. Loft, as it title suggests, is too lofty even for that. It does not even bother with scaring the audience. Or, to put it more clearly, it bothers to build up the audience’s fear insofar as it wants to deflate and ridicule it.

But Kurosawa’s films are much too intelligent to be bad horror. His Kairo was one of the films that jumpstarted the Asian horror explosion at the beginning of the millennium. Together with (the truly scary) The Ring, it uses banal imagery and puts them in the context of a metaphysical horror beyond the reaches of logic, teasing and teasing the audience into paranoia and confusion with so much built-up atmosphere. All-too-recognizable household objects like computers, the internet, long-haired women and empty rooms became menacing fodder for a paranoiac’s overactive imagination, subverting the Western horror trend of fantastical monsters and creatures; it caused me and many others to take a long hard stare at our innocent household appliances after the movie.

The rest of post-millenial Asian horror learned the gore-less atmosphere and banal imagery well, wearing the genre out with the same static camera and unhurried editing that served its predecessors so well. But perhaps these ‘tools’ that Kurosawa had employed earlier weren’t even meant to be horror tools at all – they could’ve just been means with which Kurosawa had wanted to subvert the horror genre, fucking it up for the audience and, at the same time, teaching us a new language of suggestive horror.

Now, with the clout of Asian horror passed and (thankfully) forgotten, Kurosawa returns to the genre again, to fuck things up and mess with the audience’s heads. Loft takes all the clichés of Asian horror – the long-haired female, the absence of gore, the themes of urban isolation and loneliness – and scatters them like sticks in the air. Having lured in the Asian horror crowd, he gives us a premise straight out of the numerous copycats that followed – writer with mental block (female – always female) moves to a decrepit old house and starts seeing strange apparitions (of a female in black dress). Even through the exposition acts, he shoots the film in full-on horror mode, making big scenes out of inconsequential situations as the writer sees things that might be there/might not be there.

As the film lurches slowly to its inevitable climax, Kurosawa makes a different film all together, subverting, even fucking with what the audience thinks might happen next. He leads the audience down a familiar path in each scene and, instead of progressing to a logical conclusion (logical in horror-movie terms, that is), turns round a different path all together, what leads the critics to calling it ‘incoherent.’ He sets up a horror-specific scenes to build suspense when the protagonist plays hide-and-seek with the ghost, but when it finally appears in front of her (and we expect her to die horrifically), Kurosawa cuts to the next scene days after with the protagonist completely safe, never returning to what happened earlier. Another scene brings a character face to face with the ghost, but as the score builds up toward its inevitable scary climax, the character just walks right out of frame, leaving the ghost high and dry, talons outstretched uselessly. The most telling of all these frustratingly tedious and bizarre sequences, however, is the ending, in which a tacked-on cheesy happy ending is violently and rudely interrupted by an ‘alternative’ ending, forcing the chapter to close on a sickeningly bleak note.

It almost seems as though there are three stories are being told here – the story with its characters – existing with its own internal logic and rules –, the story that the camera (ie Kurosawa) tells that deliberately avoids, subverts and confuses the former, and the story that the audience wants to be told (that exist in the typical horror movie lingering shots before a ghost appears out of the corner). If anything, Loft is a cinematic thesis in which Kurosawa explores the language of editing and rhythm, a playground in which we are the toys.

Kurosawa never seemed to have liked his audiences – even when he’s playing to our expectations, he is never making things simple for us. Kairo was all atmosphere and no climax, deliberately falling short of the right notes (whereas subsequent Asian horror was hitting all the right notes, but sounding completely out of place). Here, Loft plays it straight-up but shows us the middle finger when we don’t expect it, like a mischievous imp leading us right to the door and slamming it in our faces. It is an experiment, a fascinating one where the audience never knows where he’s leading us toward, not even until the end.

But Kurosawa obviously knows his stuff well – he is experimenting with the format the same way a deity makes people suffer just to see ‘how much we can take.’ The way he effortlessly leads the audience to the noose is unsettling – he uses jump cuts (between shots with very small changes in between) and weird back projection to drum up a feeling of madness and paranoia even among the most commonplace scenarios. And, in spite of him, the story and its characters have an intrigue and urgency that carries it along despite of all the convoluted twists thrown along its way.

What comes out of this whole fucked-up affair is a very strange movie, but an experience unlike any other movie in cinemas now (which is why the audience, which automatically rejects anything that doesn’t fit a formula, cannot accept it). It’s bewildering and frustrating, like any other Kurosawa movie, but it’s interesting, and that makes it so much the worth watching than a movie as boring as Apocalypto, which tries to wow with grandiose themes within its three-act structure. But perhaps ultimately, what makes a movie is our expectations – I’m easy, give me a thousand-year-old mummy, 1920’s pre-war Japanese scientists, eerily scratchy film reels, a girl that vomits mud, and a mystery that never solves itself, and I’ll lick my paws like a happy puppy. But expect a normal movie while watching a Kurosawa movie, and you will be fucked.