Uza-Makin' Me Dizzy

Last week I did something for the first time in about 18 years, an activity many fine fellows I know are required to make an annual requirement. 

I had an eye exam.

Strange setup, eh? Stare at pointy objects as they move towards your nose. Put your chin in a weird dipped bowl slightly reminiscent of a baseball player’s cup. Feel as though someone is staring into your eyes without actually looking you IN the eye. Be told that you process stress too intensely and need to change your lifestyle...of vision.

As a person whose previous experience with glasses was getting a headache from Avatar’s 3D, this was odd. Naturally, the best possible followup was to watch Higuchinsky’s 2000 surreal J-horror Uzumaki (aka Spiral). Appropriate since my eyes were already looped out. Also appropriate because with my newfound soon-to-be four-eyes nerddom, it was time to turn in a makeup assignment for Stacie Ponder’s Final Girl Film Club .

Quick Plot: In residential Nagano, sweet teenager Kirie and boyfriend Shuichi (although I prefer Netflix’s description, paramour) begin to notice their increasingly wacky neighbors. Shuichi’s father spends most of his time videotaping anything with a slight spiral shape, from snail shells to pottery bottoms and washing machine spin cycles. Classmates act out in other ways, like grooming themselves with Bridgett Bardot sized hair curled like a French Poodle on steroids or stalking crushes and committing suicide when spurned.

You know, it’s just another cutting edge trend, like Giga Pets or The Jersey Shore.

Except this one is slowly dragging an entire town into a puce-hued purgatory of eery imagery and increasingly nauseating camera angles.

Kinda like The Jersey Shore.

Uzumaki is based on an epic manga (to the non-nerds, that’s, to my understanding, a medium more respected than comic books but less esteemed than graphic novels) and was considered fairly groundbreaking for its modern surrealism. Ten years later, it’s...damn creepy.

I often find myself in trouble for not praising the work of David Lynch. While I run hot and cold with his films, I’ll easily concede that Inland Empire is a strong example of dream cinema. Which is fine and not nearly as important as its three hour running time wants it to be.

Uzumaki is a perfect nightmare, from its oddly distant non sequitur dialog to random spurts of overanxious gore. Moments of horror--like a well-directed millipede and an open earlobe--mix well with eerie weirdness, including a haunting, humorously awkward scene where a slow moving high school outcast moves like a gooey snail. The result is incredibly distorting.

Something is happening in Korouzu because something is happening in 1999, or Japan, or the world in general. Like another avant garde Japanese horror Suicide Club, Uzumaki throws a lot of smoke (literally) and mirrors at its audience while casually capturing a little real world horror. High school students want to fit in. High school students want to stand out. Small towns slowly eat up the ambitious young who are dying to escape. We want nothing more than to help out parents and are horrified and disappointed when we can’t.

And so on.

There are a lot of themes floating (or spiraling) throughout Uzumaki, whether fully intentional or not. Some viewers may find the film to be an empty exercise in visual experimentation, while others could interpret the story as human and deep. What’s great about the film is that it works either way.

High Points

Kirie doesn’t have much more depth than your average final girl, but newcomer Eriko Hatsune is a sweet presence that helps to give what could be all style some heartfelt substance

Though it wasn’t the most pleasing sight to my already strained eyes, Higuchinsky’s camerawork--from upside-down surprise entrances to slight swirls spinning nearly out of frame--more than succeeds at pitting the viewer smack in the middle of a nightmare

Low Points

Don’t, as I did, take a 20 minute break from Uzumaki to make some dinner and answer the phone. This is a film meant to be absorbed in one unsettling sitting and I do worry that my failure to do took something out of my experience.

Lessons Learned

Not all girls are charmed by jack-in-the-boxes being thrust in their faces

Good hair makes a good gymnast

The best way to divert an uncomfortable conversation is to eat some very goooooood melon

Keep all power tools away from the insane

Rent/Bury/Buy

This is definitely a film worth seeing for any genre fan, and one I’ll eventually add to my collection as its rewatchability is high. That being said, I imagine its oddness and atmosphere are fairly polarizing and could prove annoying to a lot of viewers. Try it out first and go from there.