Uzumaki – Review

Uzumaki is a little reminder that pretty much anything goes when it comes to Japanese horror. I first watched this film about 10 years ago when I just a young impressionable girl, not knowing that the world was full of things more terrifying than ghosts and Leatherface, so here I am to warn you about the abstract concept of…Killer spirals! Ok, who am I kidding here really? I doubt many of you are losing sleep at night from contemplating the likelihood of a vortex opening under your bed and swallowing you whole, so what are the odds that this film is actually frightening?

Uzumaki begins at quite a dreamy pace in the sleepy town of Kurouzucho. Teenagers and potential love interests, Kirie and Shuichi, are a bit worried about Shuichi’s father’s eyebrow-raising obsession with spirals; filming snail shells, creating whirlpools in his miso soup and building himself a little garage/fun house where he keeps all of his spiral related objects. Eventually his fascination spirals out of control (see what I did there) and soon enough he’s climbing into the washing machine to get a ‘point of view’ spiral shot. Needless to say he doesn’t survive and the outcome is a tad grotesque. But this is just the beginning, as a teenager’s hair becomes oddly curly it begins to take over her brain (weird) some guy becomes so fixated with the vortex that he twists his body in the most disturbing way to form a spiral shape (weirder) and then of course, people start turning into snails (What?)

This is one freakin’ outlandish film. And not only is it the bizarre goings on but the filming too is a bit odd; shots are flipped and tilted sideways, there is a strange green tint when you know that something freaky is about to occur, random cuts of people walking but played in reverse, and quite frankly sinister, distorted close ups of peoples’ faces (reminiscent of Soundgarden’s ‘Black Hole Sun’) in which bulging eyes spin in opposite directions. Gross. What starts as a slow beginning soon escalates to frantic proportions until everyone (except for the teenage couple and a journalist who seem unexplainably immune) goes totally round the bend.

So, back to the previous question, is it actually scary? No… Hmm well, yes. Sort of, but not really. To be honest it’s just weird in a thoroughly creepy way. It gave me a few chills while watching it, though they were down to the unpleasant and quite often sudden imagery, it’s the kind that tickles the back your neck when you find yourself staring at the screen in disbelief. I myself wouldn’t consider it a horror, maybe somewhere along the lines of a fantasy/thriller with a little bit of romance thrown in? The insanity never really gets explained, nobody really knows where this sudden vortex inclination came from, and the ambiguous ending might leave you baffled, but then what plausible reason could be given for events of this nature? Exactly. So, if you’d like to watch a film which makes sense then you should perhaps give it a miss (though, if that’s what you’re after you are almost certainly on the wrong website.) The cinematography is intense, the creativity is marvellous and there are plenty ‘What the hell?’ moments. It is wonderfully, disturbingly surreal and for that reason I think everyone needs to see it at least once.