Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Loft

The ghosts return once more to direct the filmic spaces of Kurosawa, delving even deeper into the narrative of creatures who return among the living to exact vengeance for an unburied past or to seek forgiveness for what has been forgotten.

This "Loft," presented at the Turin Film Festival in 2005, despite the already overused themes, gave us hope not only because behind the camera was the brilliant mind of Kiyoshi Kurosawa ("Seance," "Cure," "Charisma," "Pulse," and "Barren Illusions" are just some of his cinematic masterpieces), but also for an unprecedented horrific introduction in oriental horror cinema: the mummy, found in perfect condition by anthropologist Yoshioka after a thousand years of abandonment, and he keeps it in his house. But the symbol that unites the unearthed creature and the protagonist, the writer Reiko, is the mud—ingested voluntarily to preserve the beauty of the body or vomited as a tool of purification from a soul disease that culminates in delirium and horror when the two female protagonists make contact.

Reiko, who due to several depressive crises cannot finish her romance novel, is encouraged by her gruff and quirky editor to find a new home in the countryside, away from the city's chaos where she can find more inspiration.

As per the script, the unwise young woman ends up in a cursed rural house, with the restless ghost of a former tenant seeking revenge after being murdered. One day, she sees through the window the anthropologist who seems to be transporting a human body, and horror erupts among the writer's frightening visions, hangings, the mud, inner purification, a crime solved with an unexpected (but simplistic) twist...

Kurosawa works well from the outset with his always very unique shots, the details, his dark perspectives, the fixed shots of disarming beauty, staging a subliminal novel where man is always the object of redemption, of a madness that gradually leads to the loss of the soul and eternal wandering in incurable psychotic blindness.

Themes already addressed with exceptional results in "Pulse," which nonetheless made us hopeful because the plot itself held a certain interest and charm.
And yet if "Loft" initially proceeds well, permeated with that perpetual sense of anguish so dear to Kurosawa, unlike his visionary masterpieces, towards the first three-quarters of an hour, it loses the thread of the narrative and arrives at the incomprehensible.

The talented director's attempt was to avoid the usual topos of oriental terror, but he fails miserably, and what we face is a film completed only partially, with many, too many unanswered questions.

Well-directed and excellent actors move in the shadows and are inescapably subjugated by them.

The soundtrack, once again using extradiegetic disturbing and metallic noises to heighten tension, still works, and certain scenes are memorable for their power.

Kurosawa's usual philosophy of the ability to fill the visual field of every single shot, forcing the passive and bored eye (ours) to become active and involved in this ensemble without logic, no longer helps, forced by an interesting plot but expanded into involuntary absurdity.

Fortunately, the following year Kurosawa recovered by directing the excellent horror "Retribution," which despite marking a stylistic and directorial change, is remembered as an original and visionary gem of the genre. The genius is not dead.