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cover of Home Vision Entertainment's DVD of SEANCE - artwork copyright 2005 Public Media Inc.

a.k.a. Korei
companies: Twins Japan
and Kansai Telecasting Corp.,
Daiei Co. Ltd for theatrical
year: 2000
runtime: 97′
country: Japan
director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa
writers: Tetsuya Onishi
and Kiyoshi Kurosawa
cast: Koji Yakusho, Jun Fukubi,
Tsuyoshi Kusanagi, Kitarou,
Ittoku Kishibe, Sho Aikawa
dvd company: Home Vision Entertainment
release date: May 17, 2005
retail price: $24.95
disc details: Region 1 / single layer
order this film from Amazon.com

Plot: Sato (Koji Yakusho), a television sound designer, supports his wife Junko (Jun Fukubi), whose psychic abilities prevent her from keeping a steady job.  One day a young kidnapped girl accidentally lands in their care.  Rather than reporting her discovery immediately to the authorities, Junko decides to keep the child in their home for a few days while feeding the police clues purportedly gained by her psychically.  But things take a turn for the worse when the child accidentally dies in Junko and Sato’s care . . .

Based on the novel Seance on a Wet Afternoon by Mark McShane, which was previously (and more directly) adapted into a 1964 film starring Richard Attenborough and directed by Bryan Forbes, SEANCE is another fine genre-defying turn for Kiyoshi Kurosawa.  Originally produced on 16mm for Japanese television, the film (like SERPENT’S PATH and EYES OF THE SPIDER before it) was bumped to 35mm and given a theatrical release there in 2001 before making its way to home video in North American in 2005.

Those expecting a straight horror film should check those expectations at the door, as SEANCE is a drama before it’s anything else.  Unlike in the novel on which it is based, the crime that provides the impetus for the story is not initially committed by the family at its center.  The convergence of the two, a kidnapping for ransom perpetrated by a man unknown and the middle-aged married life of an imperfect but generally happy couple, is purely accidental.  Junko is shown to be a person with genuine ability as a medium but  little notoriety and no ambition – she spends her days attending to infrequent customers wishing to resolve their issues with the dead.  Her only claim to fame is her participation in the graduate research of a psychology student at the local university.

It is through this graduate student that Junko is first contacted about the kidnapping case, the police hoping that a medium might help them find the girl, or at least give the investigation a direction.  She accepts out of an honest desire to help, having no idea that the kidnapped girl she’s helping to find had made her way into one of her husband’s equipment trunks while he was doing live sound recording a few days earlier.

The discovery of the kidnapped girl in her own home changes Junko completely, and she suddenly sees her involvement in the case a giant step towards fame – a way to financially better both herself and the husband she’s depended upon so much in the past.  Sato is resistant to her scheme at first, desiring only to phone either the hospital so that the girl can get the care she needs, but is suckered into it all the same, agreeing to go along with it even after the girl sees his face.  Everything goes well for the first few days, and Junko is nearly ready to reveal the girl’s location (where she and Sato plan to take her) when the unimaginable happens . . .

The cause of the girl’s death is left  open-ended by Kurosawa, who hints that it may be a result of a lack of emergency care while likewise suggesting that Sato may have killed her himself (we last see her alive in his arms, being muffled so that a polieceman visiting with Junko downstairs won’t hear her).  Whichever the case may be, the death throws a gigantic wrench into Junko’s plan.  She begins pondering on how to go about luring detectives to the girl’s buried body while the ghost of the child lingers over Sato and herself like a guilty conscience.

While Kurosawa provides glimpses of the supernatural early on (a seance, strange voices on an effects recording, and even an apparition seen by Junko in a restaurant where she works briefly), it is only in the last half hour that the ghostly element of the story begins to play into the plot more directly.  The ghost of the girl takes to haunting the couple, with them for every moment of their waking lives as a reminder of the death they had allowed to happen.  Things take occasional sidesteps into the bizarre, as when Sato sets fire to the doppelganger he finds sitting in his backyard (a scene scored, in strange appropriateness, with bagpipes), but always pertain to the narrative at hand.  By the time Junko calls the detectives for a final seance it is already clear that neither she nor her husband will escape retribution, be it supernatural or more earthly in origin.

No one handles space quite like Kurosawa, and his use of it (and uncanny monaural sound mixing) to evoke distinct atmosphere and emotion is in top form here.  One scene has Sato’s boss sharing a recording on which he’s sure he’s heard voices.  It ends in a single uninterrupted shot: The boss tries to shake his uneasy feelings by wandering away from the tape deck and the camera follows Sato, who begins walking away to take care of other business.  At the last moment the camera crash pans, settling on a closeup of the disturbed face of Sato’s boss, his hands clenching a headset tightly to his ears. Kurosawa wears his influences on his sleeve, and they lie at least as much with Kubrick as the exploitation of the ’60s and ’70s – late in the film Sato is seen alone with the trunk in which he’s buried the dead girl in a scene that evokes that director in a very 2001 kind of way.

The need to update Mark McShane’s novel in both time and place offered Kurosawa and co-writer Tetsuya Onishi numerous opportunities to explore philosophical ground left untouched in the source in the ambiguous style typical of the director.  Exemplative of such is Sato’s hiring of a Shinto priest (Sho Aikawa in a brief but memorable role) to exorcise his house.  Sato asks the priest if hell exists, and is told that it does if you believe in it and doesn’t if you don’t.  Sato follows with another quetsion: “Which do you?”  The priest answers, “I don’t know.”  The writing process also allowed Kurosawa to interject his growing fascination with the idea of doppelgangers, a fascination that would result in his much underrated comedy DOPPELGANGER three years later.

Home Vision Entertainment has distributed the bulk of the few Kiyoshi Kurosawa films available in America and released both SEANCE and the truly bizarre CHARISMA to domestic DVD in 2005.  Their disc of SEANCE is typical of the company’s high standards.  The progressive transfer is presented in the originally intended flat full screen ratio and does a fine, if imperfect, job of representing the 16mm photography.  Detail is limited and the image can look a bit soft overall, but damage is minimal and I suspect the film looks as it did when first aired in 2000.  The monaural audio is quiet, restrained, and very reprasentative of the original mix, and comes augmented with optional and exceptional English subtitles.  Supplements include a 10 minute interview with the director (in Japanese with optional English subtitles), trailers for SEANCE, CURE, and CHARISMA and 2 pages of liner notes by Gabe Klinger.

This is one of the simplest of Kurosawa’s films and one of the easiest to recommend to general audiences.  There’s nothing at all wrong with the Home Vision Entertainment DVD, and it can be had for considerably below retail through some of Amazon.com’s third party sellers.  Both come highly recommended from this reviewer.