Disc Reviews
The Complex Review
Hideo Nakata appears to be on familiar territory with his latest release, The Complex. If it all looks familiar, it’s probably because he takes some of the motifs and style from a previous cult J-Horror offering he directed, Dark Water (2002). Nakata made a name for himself with Ringu (released as The Ring in the UK) drawing audiences back to the cinema for horror films for the first time for many years and terrifying a whole new audience. Over the past few years Nakata has not lived up to the success or genuine unease and horror of these two films. In 2010 he even made a film in the UK, the conceptually interesting but otherwise disjointed Chatroom while last year he made a low budget Japanese critique of media culture and the internet with the Big Brother inspired and extreme Death Game. With The Complex the story certainly seems to set him back on familiar ground. But is it any good?
The film begins with young student nurse Asuka moving into a rather tired looking apartment with her parents. Shortly after moving in strange things begin to happen: her parents seem to have the same conversation each morning, she begins to talk to a lonely and sad little boy who plays in the outside playground and most sinister of all she hears scratching on the bedroom wall. This begins to disturb her and decides to introduce herself to her neighbour and see what it’s all about. At first she gets no reply when one morning the door is ajar and she ventures in to discover a rather run down shabby apartment with a pungent smell. She then stumbles on the corpse of an old man with bloody fingers who has been trying to claw into her apartment. When the pathologists arrive they tell her that he had been dead for a number of days. Needless to say this distresses her and with the help of her friend Sasahara they begin to uncover that there had been a number of hauntings and strange deaths in the building. Not only that but is there something wrong with Asuka?
A damp and haunted apartment block, the story of a dead child found in a bin, ghostly neighbours and traumatized families are all the familiar motifs that were found in Dark Water but lose some of there potency here. Added into the mix are séances and strange spiritualists trying to carry out an exorcism which are more laughable than terrifying. But the shocks work fairly well and are by and large up to the standards of an Asian J-Horror film. But the story does twist and turn as it develops and a film that begins fairly slowly develops into a pacier piece of horror with a mixture of surprises and predictable clichés along the way. As one would expect of a director of clear horror skills as Nakta the film is effective and delivers plenty of bumps and shocks along the way (without resorting to blood and gore) but one cannot help feeling that here is a director whose ideas seem to be drying up. However, its explorations of psychology are interesting and again one of the successes of Dark Water was the damp creepy to rusting Tokyo suburb building. That similar feeling and location returns to haunt The Complex.
There are no extras on the disc.
Chris Hick