Friday, June 12, 2015

Nightmare Detective 2 (Shinya Tsukamoto, 2008)


Kagenuma, the reluctant psychic of Nightmare Detective, has not found peace. His dreams are filled with the heartbreaking memories of his mother, a woman with an extreme social anxiety disorder. When Kagenuma innocently revealed his ability to read minds by asking her about her crippling fear of the world, it gave her a new one: that she was exposed to everyone, humiliated. She tried to murder her child, then she hanged herself.

It isn't just bad memories and dreams that come to him. As a child, was was terrorized by ghosts that visited him in the night or marched outside in the street. His father saw them too.

Now he spends his days shut up in his hotel room, surrounded by the children of families living there. They are fond of him, and are probably the only people he can stand to b around: bright, full of happiness, not filling his mind with adult disillusion and anger. Still, he'd rather be alone. The last thing he wants is to be called upon for his services as a psychic. 



That's when teenaged Yukie shows up. She and her schoolgirl clique pranked Yuko Kikugawa, an unloved student who has now shut herself off from the world but is appearing in their dreams. Yukie senses a threat, and she's right – soon they begin dying.

“Apologize to her”, that's Kagenuma's advice when he turns Yukie away.

Naturally he doesn't stay uninvolved for long, or we'd have no movie. When he does agree to enter Yukie's dreams, it isn't sympathy that motivates him. He sees in Yuko the same crippling terror that drove his mother mad, and he badly wants to understand. What did his mother see? Was he, her child, a monster in her eyes? What kind of fear makes someone you love unreachable?

This second film in a still unfinished trilogy about Kagenuma feels like a nexus for the character and for writer/director Shinya Tsukamoto as well. For more than half his career he has sought a reconciliation of the body with its environment. with a measure of empathy and compassion, and with a measure of optimism. Having finally achieved that his quest has moved inward to the troubled soul, and I'm finding his stories (Vital, Haze, Nightmare detective) far more tempered in their optimism. The first film featuring Kagenuma ended with nothing more spirited than a temporary respite from hopelessness for the title character.

That film was saddled with a routine police procedural plot that hindered the movie from feeling like a personal work. This time the film takes the visuals and plot logic of a Japanese ghost story, though the specter is that of a girl still living. Rather than being forced into a formula, that frees Tsukamoto to spend quality time with his characters, and to let them discover common ties (spoilers ahead)



Yukie has not been the nicest person toward her classmates, and she's fully aware of it, but then she hasn't had the happiest home life either with a mother who makes no effort to connect with her. At school she has surrounded herself with friends who are similarly uncaring of others. Yukie's insistence on reaching out to Yuko, the girl they hurt together, is alien to their nature and we gather new to Yukie herself.

Examining Yuko's bedroom, Kagenuma finds artwork she has done: dark, crowded, anxious but also among the works are pages radiating color and wonder, brightness. Happiness. If Yuko has joy in her, perhaps Kagenuma's mother did as well? In the very next scene we see Kagenuma as we've never seen him before: happily playing at games with the children of his apartment. Something in himself has been freed by the discovery. Note that Kagenuma can hear the inner thoughts of the girl's father wishing this stranger would leave his house, but importantly not until after he finds the happier artwork.



The film's coda is a sequence in which Kagenuma of hos own accord helps a child by ascending into the child's anxiety dream only to discover that the child is himself. His child self sleeps fitfully, sharing a futon with his older brother while his parents seem to find enjoyment in his suffering. It's an uncomfortable moment: on the one had, his mother is happy and laughing, and his father shares a moment of binding with her uncommon to Kagenuma's understanding of them; on the other, it's beyond him what they find delightful about their child's anxieties. It is, after all, only a dream, but one that plays on the cognizance gap between children and adults. Meanwhile, we've just learned a new detail about Kagenuma, that he has an older brother. It means nothing to the story proper, but it means something to viewers who know that Tsukamoto himself had an older brother and a troubled relationship with his own parents.



The key to setting them all free is empathy – Yukie, Yuko, Kagenuma, the troubled memory of his mother (or perhaps literally her spirit, after the ambiguous Vital, as the ghosts indicate), and maybe even setting free the director himself. Empathy comes with a price, openness to the unwanted pain of other people that warps their inner essences.  Yuko is caught in the middle. We see her and some of the figures in her art as having one eye shut and the other open too widely.  Yukie alone of her clique learns empathy, and it will forever alter her perceptions. The alternate course is to; hurt people in order to shut down one's ability to feel, which is tantamount to killing one's self (as Kagenuma's mother and Yukie's friends). Through empathy, Nightmare Detective 2 finds something more valuable than solace. The movie finds forgiveness, and through forgiveness catharsis.


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