To Tokyo ***
Dir: Caspar Seale Jones. With: Florence
Kosky, Emily Seale-Jones, Luke Smith, Robert Smith. 75 mins. Cert: 15.
Here’s one of those very rare lowish-budget,
independently produced, entirely off-radar British debuts to feel like a
discovery. The adventurous writer-director Caspar Seale Jones has relocated
what might seem a slightly stock horror start point – a fraught young woman
fleeing something abominable in her past – to Japan, a choice that instantly
gifts his frames more distinctive vistas than all those bargain-bin potboilers
pursuing teenagers through the streets of Peterborough or Stroud. More
intriguingly yet, it situates To Tokyo in that semi-abandoned Japanese
folk horror tradition that once yielded Onibaba and Kwaidan,
making merry-macabre use of a still relatively unfamiliar set of demons and
ghouls – although it transpires the film’s real monster resides closer to home.
It scores high on
dreamy-bordering-on-nightmarish atmosphere. Upon learning her mother is gravely
ill, knowingly named heroine Alice (Florence Kosky) passes into either a fugue
state or an actual wilderness that encompasses forests, deserts and a
mountainside hut where she slaps on warpaint and receives offerings of fruit
and entrails from whatever dragged her out here. For half its running time, To Tokyo is
just Kosky, some spectacular landscapes (cinematographer Ralph Messer
apparently taking notes from that lost visual whizz Tarsem Singh) and a
properly creepy spectre who suggests what would happen if Johnny Depp played The
Nightmare Before Christmas’s Jack Skellington. Seale Jones makes the bold,
rewarding decision not to explain a damn thing: the result’s a small masterclass
in show-don’t-tell cinema.
Even when Alice reaches the bright lights of
Tokyo, the depopulated backstreets and coldly indifferent skyscrapers prove
eerie and unsettling: it’s as though what came before was but a dry run for the
worst civilisation has to offer, a training camp for the traumatised. Again,
any interpretation will be yours, but there’s a fairytale logic to it, and the
action is anchored by Seale Jones’s remarkably assured imagemaking and a
performance of intense hollow-eyed persistence by Kosky that approaches what
Catherine Deneuve was getting at in Repulsion. Self-evidently a first
feature – running to just 75 minutes – it nevertheless serves as a striking and
effective calling-card: how encouraging it is to see an emergent British
filmmaker reaching for the uncanny and mysterious, rather than settling for
hackneyed or humdrum.
To Tokyo screens with a Q&A at the Everyman Muswell Hill, London this Monday at 7.30pm.
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