Word: kuroki
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Silence Has No Wings, a sensitive and subtle Japanese film directed by Kazuo Kuroki, is a surrealist portrait of post-war Japan. Paranoia dominates the world it depicts, caused by the rise of the new middle class. But the film itself is quiet and controlled...
Silence Has No Wings, a sensitive and subtle Japanese film directed by Kazuo Kuroki, is a surrealist portrait of post-war Japan. Paranoia dominates the world it depicts, caused by the rise of the new middle class. But the film itself is quiet and controlled...
...What Japanese horror master Hideo Nakata did for TV sets in his 1998 blockbuster The Ring, he does for drippy faucets in his latest film Dark Water, a tale of urban anxiety, domestic agony and spookily bad plumbing. Stressed-out single mother Yoshimi Matsubara (Hitomi Kuroki) and her five-year-old daughter, Ikuko (Rio Kanno) move into an apartment building with a serious humidity problem and a demonic elevator on loan from Poltergeist. They stick around even after a sinister water stain begins expanding on the ceiling and they learn that their building was once inhabited by a young girl...
...Kuroki, who barely gets the chance to breathe for the entire movie, turns in a heart-wrenching portrayal of maternal sacrifice. Water?in the bathtub, in a sullen black canal that oozes past the apartment building, in the rain that falls constantly throughout the film?is omnipresent. The flat itself seems to cry. This is a horror movie more tragic than terrifying...
...Director Nakata, like his characters, makes some missteps. Too many of his scares depend on Kuroki's or Kanno's agonizingly long head turns?a stilted device that feels like little more than Hitchcock-by-numbers. The film's climax?unsurprisingly, it involves a lot of water?is marred by an implausible and unnecessary epilogue. It makes you wonder if Nakata is weary of the horror genre?or, perhaps, is evolving beyond it. Suspenseful as it is, Dark Water is more successful as a portrait of the bond between a single mother and her child in alienating urban Japan...