Stare 
シライサン 「Shiraisan」
Release Date: January 10th, 2020
Duration: 97 mins.
Director: Otsuichi/Hirotaka Adachi
Writer: Otsuichi/Hirotaka Adachi (Screenplay),
Starring: Marie Iitoyo, Yu Inaba, Shota Sometani, Mitsuki Tanimura, Shugo Oshinari, Manami Enosawa,
We get the gore and grue through two university students, Mizuki (Marie Iitoyo) and Haruo (Yu Inaba), who find themselves digging into the legend of Shirai-san after experiencing the death of a friend and a brother respectively. The post-mortems on both establish that death was caused by a heart attack provoked by extreme fear. It probably didn’t help that their eyes burst from fright, something Mizuki sees first hand as her friend dies in terror at a restaurant date, the blood spatter coating the white and black décor of the establishment. Her friend’s cries of being looked at by a woman haunt Mizuki. The same with Haruo who heard the kill but saw the aftermath. Said haunting turns into a visual manifestation of the recently deceased, complete with exploded eye sockets(!), as they implore Mizuki and Haruo for help from beyond the grave.
With that as motivation, the two team up with a journalist named Mamiya (Shugo Oshinari) of the Tokyo Times and their search for clues leads to a cursed name/story: Shirai-san. Her presence is connected to the legend of a village of the blindfolded who interbred a little too much and managed to breed someone with supernatural powers.
Similar to Ring, it becomes a mystery and touches upon folklore. We even get a time-travel section to take us to the village but the mechanics of why there is a curse and how it works is handled in a slapdash manner. It is enough that Shirai-san’s story is a curse and that curse can be passed on through saying her name. There is a way to beat her and that is to stare at her long enough that she gives up chasing a person.
Now, very little about the film is shocking or original but the spikes in carnage are amusing and the actors maintain the tenor of scared/inquisitive to make following the story easy. Shirai-san is the hook. How can she makes people’s eyes explode and why does she do it? Never really answered. She just has to get close and this is where the film does have some highlights: Shirai-san’s design.
With bulging misshapen bloodshot eyes (the size of pineapples) and jerking movements similar to the basement ghost in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse, she has an unsettling look that makes unique the stereotypical horror figure of a young woman with long hair and white dress.
Her horrible haunting skills of teleporting anywhere and making people’s eyes explode leads to chase sequences that end in stare-offs. It is sometimes funny in execution. Viewers may laugh at the sight of Mizuki and Haruo quaking in fear at a woman across the room who jerks around with a grin on her face and big eyes. However, it may also by effective as the design is unnerving and forcing people to stare can be a great horror concept – the Fatal Frame series is a good example of this. She is the highlight of the film. The mystery aspect of the screenplay is solid but audio/visual its delivery is unadventurous.
The film is reliant on loud music and CG blood spray to muster scares. Its visual tone is flat. The best J-horror builds a relentlessly strange atmosphere that persists between the spikes in scares and the investigation/haunting sequences through excellent camerawork, location selection, and ghost placement or manipulation of filming medium.
In Kurosawa’s films he picks the bleakest places to film in. With something like Ring, you get a mixture of documentary format, the change in film stock/digital to influence look, and the uncanny horror elements gradually overwhelming these bits of normality while Kenji Kawai’s synth music achieves a sense of weirdness that haunts the film’s soundscape. With Stare, the camerawork is too static and too unadventurous, the action takes place in nondescript locations. Aside from the POV shots forcing us to look at Shirai-san, it just all feels like an efficient-shot-looking movie rather than one trying to be scary.
I guess I could typify this film in a similar way: efficiently shot and not so scary. Still, Shirai-san is amusing to stare at!
