Bilocation

The phenomenon of the bilocation – or the same person appearing in two or more places at the same time, is found in the biographies of saints, as well as the novels of horror writers.

One of the latter, by Hojo Haruka, was the inspiration for Bilocation, Asato Mari’s shocker about a woman with a bilocation that is capable of interfering with and perhaps even ending her life. This twist is not according to the traditional religious/mystical script, but it does lend itself to horror, a genre that in Japan has exhausted itself with endless variations of the ghost-with-a-grudge formula that became popular with the Ring films. There are no ghosts in Bilocation, but there is an ingenious story that goes beyond easy scares to unsettling speculations on the fragility of identity.

 The splitting that creates the film’s bilocations resembles the splitting (or, more accurately, the disintegration) that leads to insanity. The heroine, Takamura Shinobu (Mizukawa Asami), is an aspiring artist who has recently married a warm-hearted man (Asari Yosuke) who is nearly blind. One day, as she pays for her purchases at a local grocery, she is caught by a vigilant clerk for apparently trying to pass a phony 10,000 yen note – and is shown a recent security camera video of a Shinobu look-alike paying with a note of the same serial number. Instead of hauling her to the station for further questioning, a brusque police detective named Kano (Takito Kenichi) takes her to a decaying mansion where she meets others who have had something similar to her disturbing experience. Iizuka (Toyohara Kosuke), a bearish man with a manner between a therapist and a funeral director, tells Shinobu that she and her new acquaintances are victims of bilocations, entities who have split from the “originals” in a moment of emotional turmoil and now have their own will and purpose.

 They are also unaware of their status as bilocations, convinced instead that their “original” is a fake they must thwart – or destroy. Under Iizuka’s leadership, the small band of “originals,” which includes a hot-tempered college student (Senga Kento of the pop group Kis-My-Ft2), a feisty housewife (Sakai Wakana) and Kano, whose own crazed bilocation scuppered his once-promising career, has been collectively battling for their sanity and lives. They are later joined by Kaga (Takada Sho of the Johnny’s Jr. pop group), a cool-eyed teen who always wears a black neck-warmer nearly up to his nose and seems to know more about bilocations than even Iizuka. “Horror,” at least in its conventional sense, may not be the best word to describe the ensuing action, which ranges from the smash-mouth violent to the skin-crawlingly bizarre.

 The dilemma of Shinobu and the others has its roots less in the supernatural than their own psychologies. It’s as if, instead of having bad dreams and cold sweats, they find themselves living a nightmare they inadvertently created themselves and can’t escape. Asato Mari, a veteran maker of low-budget shockers, directs this material with a straight-faced sincerity, as well as with a welcome terseness and economy. She is also the right director for a story that views its female characters as real women with normal lives – at least until their bilocations appear. Kudos should also go to whoever designed the Siamese-twin dolls that greet Shinobu when she enters the mansion. Decadently stylish and creepily sad-eyed, they sum up the film’s message: The human mind can split and crumble, but it can’t truly divide. We’ve got to live with ourselves, however many faces look back at us in the mirror.