It Comes 
来る 「Kuru」
Running Time: 134 mins.
Release Date: December 07th, 2018
Director: Tetsuya Nakashima
Writer: Tetsuya Nakashima, Hideto Iwai (Screenplay), Ichi Sawamura (Original Novel)
Starring: Junichi Okada, Satoshi Tsumabuki, Haru Kuroki, Nana Komatsu, Takako Matsu, Munetaka Aoki, Taiga, Rie Shibata, Miho Ninagawa, Eri Ishida,
Tetsuya Nakashima was a regular name on the festival circuit back in the early 2000s with his crime films Confessions (2010) and The World of Kanako (2014) finding favour with international audiences theatrically while drama/comedies Kamikaze Girls (2004) and Memories of Matsuko (2006) became sleeper hits. Those works are talked about regularly. His 2018 horror movie It Comes, on the other hand, well, that hasn’t had as much cultural pull as his other films.
This lack of renown is spoken of with bafflement by people who have seen It Comes and like it and there in lies the reason for its disappearance – it is a thrilling experience if you’re prepared for Nakashima’s maximalist cinema style
It Comes depicts the strange and bloody events surrounding Hideki Tahara (Satoshi Tsumabuki), his wife Kana (Haru Kuroki) and their first child, a girl named Chisa, all of whom are under threat from a malicious invisible supernatural force named a Bogiwan. Its sinister presence looms large from a death in the father’s past in rural Mie Prefecture and comes to infect the family’s swank apartment in suburban Saitama and the people who surround them.
The film’s story is told from the perspectives of each of the parents before switching to that of a freelance occult writer named Nozaki (Junichi Okada) and his girlfriend, an emotionally fragile punk psychic named Makoto Higa (Nana Komatsu) who come to their aid. As the haunting gets worse, Makoto’s older sister, the most powerful psychic in all of Japan, Kotoko Higa (Takako Matsu) gets caught up in the increasing chaos and carnage for a blow-out supernatural showdown where the special effects, the horror, and the story become operatic.
Based on Ichi Sawamura’s novel Bogiwan ga, kuru, winner of the 22nd Japan Horror Novel Award (the first in Sawamura’s series of novels featuring the psychic Higa sisters seen in this film), this is Nakashima’s first crack at a proper horror movie, complete with hauntings, possession, and more. The movie feels novelistic insofar as there is a lot of backstory and a literary air to the folklore, but Nakashima is able to chunk all of this information down while visually capturing the supernatural transitions from the sinister to the murderous with aplomb.
Taking on the novel’s husband-wife-Nozaki perspective shifts means that despite running at over two hours, the film whips along at a cracking pace thanks to it jumping back and forth in a decades-spanning story and retelling certain events to provide context and for plot twists.
Fast and scary, too, because fear-building revelations are a constant motor for the action climaxing with betrayals and shock endings for various characters to keep the story unpredictable. The speed turns out to be a good thing as the mystery behind the haunting can be considered lacking.
Horror hounds looking for an iconic yurei or oni to go in the J-Horror pantheon will be disappointed as the creature isn’t shown, it’s an oft-invisible force that sometimes takes on the zombie form/voice of someone it has already offed. The legend of Gagoze is namechecked (and meaningful for those that know) but the curse of the Bogiwan comes from an original child-snatching demon made for this film. Not much effort is made to furnish it with a look or a motivation.
Click to view slideshow.It is enough to set up a vague threat to push characters into terrifying situations – poltergeist-like so that it’s presence is ambiguous as the story plays with audience perception, wrong footing them and building tension as questions emerge as to whether the trashing of the Tahara’s abode has a demonic background or is the result of a domestic dispute between adults who despise each other.
As if in acknowledgement to this fuzzy background, Makoto speaks the lines, “Where it comes from doesn’t matter, it’s how we deal with it going forward,” and this is what the film is about as it explores fear and disruption of family order.
Indeed, lending this film substance is the theme of awful adults and abused children. Running through the every character’s backstory and motivation is a tragic upbringing or an example of toxic parenthood that is slowly unveiled.
At its funniest is Satoshi Tsumabuki’s doting father is more interested in making himself look good on his blog and with friends while the more topical is Haru Kuroki’s mother, possibly suffering post-natal depression and definitely overburdened with running a household with a selfish man as a partner while overcoming abuse she had suffered. Both storylines touching on issues of modern parenting and how men and women slip into and out of roles when in public and private and the difficulty in raising a child.
So, hauntings connected to bad parenting, a father’s narcissism turbocharged and a mother trapped and desperate to live her own life. These are curses of parenthood hung around the necks of the characters, the exorcism proving to be a form of family therapy and it constantly goes way more melodramatic, fitting Nakashima’s desired tone, as tragic/horific backstories are revealed. However, as adults start dying to save Chisa, interestingly, this plays into an oddly positive message in the film of adults willing to risk everything for the vulnerable.
As a folklorist named Daigo Tsuda says – historically, people in poorer areas threw their kids away when times were tough and then blamed demons for taking them. The film presents a reversal wherein the adults are all dying one by one in order to ensure the safety of just one child. Thus, behind whatever social commentary or funny depictions is a reversal of expectation that makes a basic appeal to the viewer’s sympathy, that of self-sacrifice dignifying characters and making us care about their fates.
Visualising this is Nakashima with his maximalist style cranked all the way up for melodramatic effect. Sets are eye-catching, filled with the sorts of decoration that give them character and lit in the most dramatic ways. The editing cuts in and off the action propulsivelyy and the camera moves lithely in shots. The acting is highly theatrical and often on the verge of breaking out into the hysterical once the horror kicks in and when the violence starts, geysers of blood coat those pristine sets.
Hauntings have the purple, pink, and teal colours seen in I Saw the TV Glow (2024) and even scenes of mundanity, like characters having a conversation, will look great due to the blocking and architecture which favour parallelism and complimentary colours for costuming. Haru Kuroki, dressed even as a supermarket worker, looks iconic as she stares ruefully out of a window, smoke languidly twisting up from her cigarette. The red of blood spatter across pristine white walls will never not be shocking and the finale, involving a cast of seemingly hundreds dressed as Buddhist and Shinto priests, Okinawan yuta, Shugendo practitioners, Korean shaman, cute shrine maidens, and a scientific research team in a joint exorcism has an impressive scale that is akin to Shin Godzilla, especially with its theme of a community coming together to rescue one another.
It Comes ends up being an exception experience because Nakashima harnesses the full power of cinema to create an unpredictable and thrilling story and so it is baffling why it isn’t better known.