鯨の骨 「Kujira no Hone」
Release Date: October 13th, 2023
Duration: 88 mins.
Director: Takamasa Oe
Writer: Takamasa Oe, Kaito Kikuchi (Screenplay),
Starring: Motoki Ochiai, Ano, Ayaka Onishi, Mayu Yokota, Shohei Uno, Toshiaki Inomata, Haruka Uchimura,
Website Twitter: @kujiranohone_mv IMDB JFDB
Whales Bones is the fourth feature film from Takamasa Oe. He is probably more famous as the co-screenwriter of Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car (2021), but this work bears little similarity to that Oscar-winning drama and comes off as its own original, surprisingly beautiful and poignant mystery made trickily engaging by the alienation and app-induced hallucinations plaguing a morally reprehensible man reckoning with a date gone wrong.
Our main man is Mamiya (Motoki Ochiai), an insomniac office worker in Tokyo who is on the verge of marriage until his fiancée Yukari (Ayaka Onishi of Randen) decides to tell him that she is seeing someone else and calls it quits on their relationship. Down in the dumps, he hesitantly follows the advice of a work colleague named Yuji (Haruka Uchimura) and uses an app to score a date. This is how he meets a high school girl (played by the singer Ano) and takes her home.
As bad as that is, things get even worse for him because she commits suicide on his bed by ingesting a lot of sleeping tablets. His overwhelming instinct is self-preservation and he decides to bury her body in a forest instead of rushing her to a hospital. However, just after he finishes digging a hole to bury her in, her body disappears but not for long as a now paranoid Mamiya finds the girl again, only via a Pokemon Go-like augmented reality (AR) app named Mimi in which creators record videos at specific locations and followers hunt them down via their smartphones. The girl made videos under the name Aska and she is a charismatic figure with many fans and so, as Mamiya tries to trace her whereabouts through her videos, he becomes immersed in the world of online fandom…
From there, the film twists and turns with many breaks in Mamiya’s search hinging on coincidental discoveries during meetings with desperate influencers and weird fans he meets on his insomnia driven midnight ramblings. They sometimes serve to offer context-setting exposition or mirror his growing obsession with Aska, stoked as it is by her haunting AR-derived presence creating boundary blurring moments when she breaks out of Mamiya’s smartphone screen and walks into a present-tense scene. These moments allow the film to become a bit of a puzzle as the background of the girl is revealed piecemeal and so it makes the viewer constantly question the narrative, a sense furthered in how it’s not just temporal playfulness on offer.
Eagle-eyed and keen-eared viewers will note odd moments such as the disappearance of a cup during the coffee shop conversation Mamiya has when first meeting Aska which implies his perspective isn’t 100% believable from the start. Inconsistencies start adding up so that a playful ambiguity builds that actually invites rewatches of the film to build up interpretation but there is a serious point underlying Mamiya’s quest in that the film constantly shows the estrangement from reality that people terminally online suffer.
As Mamiya gets sucked into online fandom, we get neat visual displays of the parasitism encouraged by smartphones and a constant connection to the internet as fans, clad in blue ponchos or not, lurk in groups around their favourite influencer, unaware of the world around them as their AR devices create a new world for them. In conversations with the influencer leading them, she acknowledges to Mamiya the underlying capitalist system that pushes her stoking this addiction in how it is easier to make money on an app, though she acknowledges that her actions have no real meaning and that she can be disposed of at any time. Oe shoots these moments in a way that we don’t see the full import or fun of what they are engaging with, just a tawdry reality of people in a park absorbed by their screens. In denying viewers the glitz, it looks pathetic, funny, like a mass delusion, and audiences are encouraged to pity them and, as the story develops, it turns out that Aska is another victim of this wave of AR hype.
With its use of obsession, delusion, and mystery, it feels as if Whale Bones will slot into the tech-horror/thriller genre and it uses the AR angle and Aska’s ghost-like presence brilliantly to create that narrative tricksiness and drive home Mamiya’s slipping grip on reality. It certainly operates in similar thematic territory of something like Jane Schoenbrun’s internet-addiction fable We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2022) as Mamiya falls under the influence of his smartphone’s AR app and becomes ever more isolated and harried by internet forces which alter the way he interacts with the world. However Oe’s film isn’t quite a fit for those genres or as brutal. Indeed, it frequently comes off as funny. Mamiya is mostly a harried figure who stumbles about and, despite the existential horror, the satire of social media usage hits home effectively because, while Schoenbrun acknowledges and respects how people structure their lives around things like ASMR and creepypasta stories, Oe keeps poking fun at them and the fans come off as silly. At the conclusion of the mystery, it ends up coming off as a fable warning people about the dangers of being too online and it is hard not to laugh but also it is hard not to dive back in again just to see where Mamiya really lost touch with reality.
This sort of work is not necessarily anything new for Takamasa Oe, who is reunited with Kaito Kikuchi and actor Uchimura, who were the writer and star of Oe’s debut film Nice to Meet You (2012, 適切な距離) respectively and that film also dealt with dissolution of relationships, disassociation from reality, and being haunted by the presence of another person. However, Whale Bones is a step up as he creates a phantasmal world from the everyday shooting locations like the coffee shop in Kawasaki, Kanagawa Prefecture. Takamasa Oe makes great use of audio and visual to give a surreal edge to the social media mystery. The night-time sequences are a great metaphor for being online and beautifully shot as eerie dreamscapes lit up with an array of sparkling lights, from smartphones to street lamps and neon, while seeing online addicts move in patterns while wearing blue ponchos adds the feel of being under the sea – a link back to the opening quote of the film about seeing glowing creatures engorging themselves on whale bones. The performers are also very good, especially Ano, who has an enigmatic persona that maintains the mystery but can switch gears into something more comedic when the film requires a twist in its tail.
Jokes and looks aside, however, it does capture the way that the average person is beset with apps and tools that create a gap between the real and the virtual but in a way that is fun rather than terrifying. This might pair up well as a light-hearted partner to Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse.
Whale Bones will be screened at Japan Cuts on July 14th at 15:00. Japan Cuts runs from July 10—21, 2024 and features a wealth of classics, documentaries and fiction features and shorts. Here’s something of a preview of the titles playing. Check back here for coverage.
Also, on a meta level Mamiya an ironic name in that it is the name of the serial killer in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s serial killer thriller Cure but while that mesmerist put people in touch with the deadly chaos inside of them, Mamiya becomes ever more distanced from himself and others.