Everyone has wished at some point or other that they just be given the space to get their job done.
Airi (Moeka Hoshi, Shลgun) is a freelance exorcist who has one very simple rule: She needs to be alone in the house when sheโs performing the ritual. Well, apart from her sister (Kurumi Inagaki), but ghosts donโt really count. Itโs the living who are the real distraction, so she and her dead sibling tend to have the house to themselves as they unpack exactly why the unquiet spirit wonโt just get on with whatever awaits them on the other side.
The idea that the dead are harmless and itโs the living you have to watch out for is at the heart of Never After Dark, the new Japanese horror from writer/director Dave Boyle and producer Kento Kaku. For this South by Southwest -selected Midnighter, the duo behind Netflixโs House of Ninja eschew the contemporary post-J-Horror trends towards gore and extremity. Instead, they invoke a tone more in keeping with earlier pioneers of the genre like Kaneto Shindรด (Onibaba) or Masaki Kobayashi (Kwaidan). Itโs that sense of oppression born of sickly dread, combined with the idea that the supernatural is more part of nature than we would like to think.
Itโs a major inconvenience for Airi that the living wonโt get out of the way and let her get on with her job. After all, itโs another fairly simple exorcism, this time at an empty hotel that the owner wants โcleaning.โ However, the owner and her estate agent and the cops and even a mysterious former guest keep popping by and making Airiโs job impossible. Thereโs a constant tragedy to the way Airi has created a career of sorts that allows her to remain connected with her sister, but only through uncanny means: a looking glass, a rearview mirror, anything that provides a glimpse but no real contact. Who, one wonders, is truly haunting who as she wanders the halls of this empty inn where melancholy and shadows have settled like dust. As Airi breaks with a slight grin into another beer left in the fridge for her, her solitude clings to her like a blanket. Itโs a shame, and soon a menace, that she has to deal with all these people and their unstated agendas.
Boyle isnโt about a certain grisliness, as portended by the discovery of a mysterious cache of human teeth. But what makes Never After Dark genuinely intriguing is its subtle subversions of the conventions of Japanese haunting stories. Itโs cold and coiled, like a snake in autumn, and its slow crawl towards a surprisingly violent end never seems less than earned or inevitable.
