Fatal Frame (

2014

)

Video Game Movie: Just the phrase alone is enough to give me a feeling of dread. Sure, I watch a lot of garbage movies, but even I’m a bit wary of going into a video game movie. Normally, the best you can hope for is that the film will be so outrageously bad that it will loop back 'round the other way and provide a bunch of unintentional laughs when watched with a few friends and a copious amount of beer (see pretty much any film in Uwe Boll’s oeuvre). For the most part, video game movies are bland and uninteresting, sure signs that the filmmakers were not invested in the project. Perversely, it seems that the better the video game, the less capable filmmakers are in transferring it to film. Silent Hill was a masterful series of horror games on the PS2, but in the hands of Hollywood, it is either disappointing (Silent Hill (2006)) or downright atrocious (Silent Hill: Revelations (2012)). Resident Evil, a competitor of Silent Hill and a much, MUCH dumber series of games winds up having a long-running film series that when averaged together comes out as basically ok. The Resident Evil films provide the kind of entertainment best suited for long plane rides or days spent sick in bed, being the sort of movie one can fall asleep in the middle of a wake up for the climax without missing much. As you can probably guess, my hopes were not high when I sat down to watch Fatal Frame, a film adaptation of yet another acclaimed series of PS2 horror games. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that it was actually good, not just a good video game movie but a good movie on its own merits.

Our story is set in a Catholic orphanage/boarding school somewhere in the Japanese countryside (probably in Kyushu, the region in Western Japan where the Portuguese missionaries were most active and where most of Japan’s 500,000 Catholics reside today). The setting is a curious one; were this film a product of a catholic country I could write it off as a thoughtless concession to realism or the filmmaker’s repressed fetish for nuns. However, the catholic population in Japan is tiny (less than 1% of the population) and the number of Catholic institutions there is correspondingly small. Nor is this an artifact of the video games, none of which are set in Catholic schools or make any significant mention of any form of Christianity. Indeed, the games are very much rooted in Shinto folklore, as opposed to any foreign faith. It seems likely that director Mari Asato is working elements from her own life (she was born in the Kyushu region, Okinawa specifically) into the film. Such a personal investment in her work goes some way towards explaining why Fatal Frame is so much better than the average video game movie. Of course, it consequently doesn’t have all that much to do with the games it claims to be based on aside from including series staples like schoolgirls, ghosts and cameras.

I can understand why this school has to pull double duty as an orphanage, as there would be no way that a responsible parent would ever send their daughter there. The whole place fetishizes suicide by drowning to a frankly worrying degree, even by Japanese standards. Each year the graduating seniors sing a song about Ophelia (Hamlet’s lover who went mad after he rejected her and drowned herself) as part of their commencement ceremony. The headmistress has a gigantic reproduction of John Everett Millais’ portrait of Ophelia (which depicts a romanticized version of Ophelia after she has drowned herself; she still looks beautiful and is surrounded by flowers). Unsurprisingly, this school has been a hotbed of suicides since the Meiji era, to the point where restless spirits contaminate the very water supply. In particular, young lesbian couples facing societal persecution have opted to drown themselves so that they can die together and be reunited in the next world. Just how common an occurrence this was in the past is never really specified, all we know is that it happened and happened a lot.

At first, the film follows Kasumi Nohara, a senior about to graduate from the boarding school. She has a crush on a popular classmate of hers, one Aya Tsukimori. Unfortunately, Aya has just turned into a full-blown Hikikimori and refuses to leave her room so Kasumi’s chances for romancing her properly are minimal. For this reason, Kasumi turns to the occult for a solution. According to local legend, if you kiss a portrait of your beloved at midnight they will fall in love with you (either that or it will curse you, the reports on just what this ritual does are mixed). Kasumi enlists her classmate Michi Kazato to get a photo of Aya, but even after camping outside Aya’s room for a whole afternoon Michi can’t get a photo. Kasumi does manage to dig up what looks like a photo of Aya somewhere off-camera though and that night she tries the ritual at midnight. Not long after that, she vanishes without a trace. Let that be a lesson to all the kids in the audience: never use magic to make someone fall in love with you.

Kasumi’s disappearance is just the start of a whole series of odd occurrences. Pretty soon half the girls at the boarding school are having odd dreams about a ghostly girl that looks exactly like Aya, before waking up next to the photo Kasumi used, on the verge of kissing it. The whole film is hauntingly beautiful, but the dream sequences are the real standouts. They are inserted into the film without warning, one scene will be normal and the next will be subtly wrong, but a few minutes will elapse each time before anything truly surreal happens. Asato pulls this trick a couple of times, and it never stopped catching me flat-footed. Shortly after the dreams begin, the disappearances start, with a few girls vanishing completely from the school just as Kasumi did. Shortly thereafter, some of the missing girls turn up drowned in the river. Michi seems particularly haunted by the dreams, I lost count of how many times she miraculously wakes when her lips are hovering right over the cursed photo. It's more than she can take, and resigning herself to vanishing and drowning she goes to deliberately kiss the picture. At the last moment, Aya, emerging from her seclusion in her room, stops Michi from kissing the photo.

As it turns out the photo isn’t of Aya at all, but instead is a portrait of a mysterious doppelgänger. Aya and Michi set out to discover the identity of the girl in the portrait and break the curse that is afflicting the school. In the process, their feelings for one another start to deepen. The tentative romance plotline and the mystery/horror plotline actually complement each other fairly well, giving us a personal investment in the characters and raising the stakes of stopping the curse. The horror of the situation actually pushes the two girls closer and closer together. For instance, when a group of their classmates decides that if they simply kill Aya the curse will go away (between this and The Secret World of Kanako (2014) it seems like Japanese high school students are about as capable of violence as hardened criminals) Michi stops them by kissing Aya and showing that it’s not Aya who is cursed. Later, when Michi intentionally triggers the curse in order to investigate it, she ties herself to Aya with a red thread so that the other girl can follow her. In addition to the popular Japanese superstition that says that an invisible red thread binds fated lovers together, being tied together means that they have to share a bed that night. Feel free to draw your own conclusions on that one, as despite this being a lesbian-themed horror movie Fatal Frame is not overly interested in cheap thrills. The whole thing offers a fairly unique viewing experience, I have seen plenty of horror films, and even a few horror/coming-of-age stories (Phenomena (1985) and It (2017) spring to mind), but I have never even heard of a horror, Shoujo Ai, coming of age story before. Novelty has to count for something, and a story that is both well-made and novel is going to count for a lot.

Already I can hear the angry clacking of politically correct social critics. Admittedly, there is plenty to take offense at in Fatal Frame. The romanticization of suicide stands out as something particularly objectionable, especially given Japan’s shockingly high (for a developed, industrialized nation in a temperate climate anyway) suicide rate. The story about the young girls killing themselves so they can be together forever is exactly the sort of thing you don’t want to say too sensitive or mentally ill teenagers. This is somewhat canceled out by the film’s ending which reveals the true nature of the haunting going on at the school and shows the full cost that suicide has on the living left behind. Less problematic, but more visible is the way in which the film treats high school age lesbian attraction. It very specifically casts the romance between Aya and Michi as “a phase.” Indeed, at the end when Michi has the chance to kiss Aya and doesn’t, she remarks that at that moment she feels like they are no longer girls, but have fully transitioned to womanhood. I’m sure that someone will regard this as offensive, but only if we look at the characters as representative of their entire demographic rather than as individuals. Certainly, some women (and men though less frequently) have passionate friendships in their girlhood that verge on romantic, only to pursue heterosexual relationships later in life. Obviously, it’s not “just a phase” for everyone, but for some people it certainly is. These characters are supposed to be individuals, not representations of their demographics or exemplars of a flat average.