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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