Spring up like the proverbial bamboo shoots after a rain storm in the postwar boom years, when they were promoting as ideal communities for the rising middle class, Japan’s danchi (public housing projects) have since acquired a rather dark image as the older ones molder and decay and the original residents either move out or pass away. Not surprisingly, one is the setting of horrormeister Nakata Hideo’s The Complex (Kuroyuri Danchi), his first film in his signature genre since his 2007 Kaidan (though that film is less J-Horror than a homage to traditional ghost story films).
The title danchi is the sort of dank, crumbling, under-populated dwelling familiar from Nakata’s Dark Water (Honogurai Mizu no Soko kara, 2003), a J-Horror classic about a single mom and her six-year-old daughter who take up residence in a creepy, water-logged apartment building that turns out to be haunted. This time, the action centers on Asuka (Maeda Atsuko), a nursing student who moves into the Kuroyuri Danchi (“Black Lily Complex”) with her mom, dad and cute little brother.
Before she is properly settled into her new home, however, she hears strange scratching noises from next door. Worried that her neighbor, an elderly man living alone, might be in trouble, she screws up the courage to venture into his rat’s nest of an apartment and discovers that he is no longer among the living. The noises, however, do not stop, nor do other strange incidents.
Afraid that the spirit of the old man might be out for revenge, since she did not immediately respond to his signals of distress, Asuka goes to Sasahara (Narimiya Hiroki), a professional house cleaner she encountered in the old man’s apartment. Telling her that the dead dwell in a realm where time has stopped and warning her to have no contact with them, he offers to help her. She also finds solace in playing with a lonely little neighbor boy who is about the same age as her brother, but the kid – as well as much else in her life, is not quite what she thinks.
Much of what transpires from this point will be familiar to fans of Dark Water and other horror films that derive their scares from, not jack-in-the-box shocks, but a slow accretion of details that undermine our confidence and faith in the rational, material world that regards ghosts as little more than creations of superstitious minds. It begins to leads us, in other words, into an alternate, ancient reality, where the unquiet dead invade the souls of the living.
Nakata is a past master at this, though in The Complex he is not striking out for new territory, but rather returning to his native Japan, where surface modernity masks a traditional belief structure that has proven remarkably durable. Asuka and Sasahara keep in touch by cellphone, but when an otherworldly force threatens to overwhelm her, he calls on a female shaman and her acolytes to exorcise it.
Nakata has also found an ideal Asuka in Maeda Atsuko, a former star of the AKB48 all-girl pop group who has become an in-demand film actress, starting with her turn as a troubled schoolgirl in the Ichikawa Jun coming-of-age drama How to Become Myself (Ashita no Watashi no Tsukurikata, 2008). She delivers the usual pop-eyed screams with unusual conviction, but where she really excels is in Asuka’s transition from kind-hearted normality – she’s the kind of girl who flashes a bright-eyed smile at a spooky-looking little boy on a deserted playground – to fear-prostrated numbness.
This transition is so natural and well-grounded that, despite the yawning gap between her two incarnations, we can find signs of the latter lifeless wraith in her former chipper self, beginning with her strange attachment to an old watch that has long-since stopped.
Can anything or anyone, from a desperate Sasahara (who is wrestling with his own demons) to a hard-working exorcist, bring that former self back? In Nakata’s unforgiving world, you should never make a promise to a ghost you aren’t prepared to keep.
Mark Schilling