Inunaki Mura: Secrets And Lies

How many horror movies have you seen that revolve around a secret? Whether it’s a “terrible secret” or “dark secret” or some other variation, people have them, houses have them, entire towns have them, and the horror generally lies in the revelation of that secret, the truth of what happened oh so long ago. As I’m writing this, it occurs to me that that’s also not that unusual a premise for drama too, but shhhh, we don’t talk about that. The point is, it’s something that comes up a lot.

Like lots of ghost stories and stories about cursed places, Inunaki Mura (Howling Village) is very much about secrets, especially secrets kept intergenerationally. And it could have been a pretty good ghost story, but ultimately it tries to do too much and suffers from pacing issues, especially in the third act.

Akina and her boyfriend Yuma are out in the country in the middle of the night, testing an urban legend. They’ve heard that there’s one particular old tunnel, known as the “Howling Tunnel,” and every night at 2am, the pay phone next to the tunnel entrance rings, and when it does, the tunnel opens up as a pathway to a mysterious, forgotten village. And so here they are, at this payphone in front of this tunnel at two in the morning, recording themselves, and they’re just about to give up and go home when the pay phone suddenly rings. Akina answers it, and we don’t hear what she hears, but she says “we’ll be there right away” and then runs off, Yuma desperately trying to keep up.

They run down the length of this old, dark tunnel and come out into the woods. They find a sign lying on the ground. A sign that reads “the Constitution of Japan does not apply beyond this point.” There’s a village, deserted and falling into ruin.

Well, not entirely deserted.

Akina and Yuma make it out alive (barely), and Akina isn’t really the same afterward. Elsewhere, Yuma’s older sister Kaneda, a psychologist at a hospital, is working with a little boy whose parents have brough him in because he’s exhibiting some unusual behavior. Like talking to people who aren’t there. Except Kaneda can see them. And they can see her. So we’ve got a village that doesn’t show up on any map but appears mysteriously under the right circumstances, and ghosts sort of walking around in the waking world. This being a Japanese horror film, stories about lost and vengeful spirits fit right into a larger tradition, but unlike films like Ringu or Dark Water, it never really develops the same sense of brooding atmosphere those films have. Which is not to say that it doesn’t have its moments - it absolutely does, making up for the lack of atmosphere with inventive visual approaches to flashbacks and some genuinely startling moments. But these strengths are undercut, first by the film’s pacing. The story hits the ground running, which isn’t a problem by itself, but it only lets moments breathe intermittently, sometimes falling into a tendency to barrage us with spooky moments or melodrama, so nothing really has a chance to take hold, and there’s little sense of events building either. And it’s not so consistent as to feel unrelenting or oppressive, so it doesn’t really generate tension that way either. There are moments in and of themselves that work very well, that are unnerving in ways that avoid cliche, but they just sort of exist as discrete moments placed next to each other, rather than as a cohesive experience.

The other big problem is a few too many ingredients in the stew. At the core of this film is a really good idea about a mythical village that doesn’t appear on any map and can only be reached through a specific abandoned tunnel in the middle of the night. And behind this village is a story, a really upsetting and horrifying story, one that drives a lot of the better moments and which could have easily carried the film by itself. But then there’s also a psychic doctor who can see dead people and on top of that there’s some kind of curse associated with the village (one which appears to have a pretty distasteful origin) that’s starting to affect people and all of it together just ends up being too much. The curse especially dominates the third act, crowding out the more interesting stuff about the village’s history, and since it’s something that’s sort of introduced in the middle of the film, it feels like the whole story just takes a hard left turn into a different, less interesting story. On top of that, the third act, when things should be coming to a head, just drags and drags until the film sort limps to a close with another instance of “the end…OR IS IT?” that lands with a thud. It's like the film sort of forgot what it was about as it was concluding, or that it realized it had this whole other storyline with which it hadn’t done much up to this point.

Like in the other Japanese horror films I mentioned above, water is an important signifier of death and the afterlife here, as well as the futility of trying to hide the sins of the past, because they always stay with you and will rise to the surface eventually. There’s a terrible secret about this village, one that residents of the area would rather forget, alongside other, smaller secrets - doctors who falsify autopsy reports to hide a family’s disgrace, fathers who lie about their children’s parentage to save the mother’s feelings, all of these ways that tragedies past and present are covered up for the sake of appearances. If the film had been content to keep this more metaphorical and centered on the story of the village, it would I think have been a much stronger offering. As it is, it becomes entirely too literal in some ways that end up making the whole thing kind of a confusing mess in the final analysis.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon