(Note: This one gets a little spoilery toward the end.)
Sometimes, if I’m trying to figure out what I want to watch next and I don’t have anything specific on my radar, I’ll flip through various and sundry streaming services and sometimes pick something I know absolutely nothing about, based on its description and maybe the thumbnail art. No, you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but you also don’t have time to read the first two chapters of every book in the store, so the cover helps narrow things down. And what I’m coming to realize is just how unhelpful those heuristics can be. Something can look really generic and end up being surprisingly good. Conversely, something can also look really promising (or at least worth considering) and end up being dreck when you watch it.
Temple is very much an example of the latter. It’s a dull, pointless exercise in cliché, as generic as they come. I mean, one of the production companies involved is called “Genre Project” and boy howdy, if that’s not a red flag I don’t know what is.
The film opens with a perfunctory flashback to two police officers investigating a temple and…something bad happened there? There’s blood on the floor? Whoops, too late, flashback’s over. It’s a good thing we had it, though, because how would I know that something bad happened at the temple? Certainly not because I’m watching a horror movie called “Temple.” Cut to credits full of ominous music, interspersed with lots of newspaper articles about how something bad happened at a temple. Now we’re in the present where, for some reason, someone identified as “Professor Ryo” is at what seems to be a hospital, interviewing someone who is badly injured, has trouble speaking, and is confined to a wheelchair with some kind of plastic shielding around it because…well, spoilers, we never find out. Ryo wants to know what happened five days ago, so…cue another flashback to five days ago.
So here’s one of the big problems with this film - none of the protagonists are actual people. James is a slick alpha-male philandering douchebag (the kind of guy who slicks his hair back and paws his girlfriend possessively in the presence of other men), Chris is faintly (and sometimes not-so-faintly) creepy and not much else, and Kate is a complete cipher, utterly opaque. None of them have anything approaching inner lives, and collectively they have all the personality of a high-end vodka commercial. They aren’t necessarily so loathsome that you root for their deaths as much as it’s just really hard to care what happens to them one way or another.
The film jumps back and forth between the three of them in flashback and Ryo interviewing the mysterious wheelchair-bound figure in the present. And this brings us to the next big problem with the film. The pacing is terrible - fully a third of the movie is Kate, James, and Chris just sort of wandering around Tokyo, as if once they arrived they’d forgotten why they made the trip in the first place, so they just go shopping and clubbing instead. What little forward momentum we do get is the product of naked contrivance instead of character and consequence. While they’re out wandering around Tokyo, our trio stumbles on a little antiquities shop. Here, Kate finds a book about Japanese folk tales, but when the shop proprietor sees the book, she not only refuses to sell it to Kate, she also kicks them out and closes the store for the day. Which seems awfully hamfisted to me, if you’re trying to tell us “oooooh spoooooky!” But how else are we going to get our protagonists out of Tokyo? So…Chris just goes back to the shop later at night and whaddaya know? The shop is mysteriously open and the book is sitting right there! Problem solved! Chris walks into a small bar where the bartender just happens to recognize the temple depicted in the book of folk tales, and there’s a salaryman there who just happens to be from the village near the temple! They both tell him it’s a really bad place and that he shouldn’t go there! He gets directions anyway! It’s like the filmmakers kept painting themselves into corners instead of figuring out a different way to tell the story. The narrative cuts back and forth between the interview and the protagonists eventually making their way to the titular temple, and it’s not distracting by itself, but both sides of the story seem so aimless - Ryo asks questions and is evasive, Kate, James and Chris kind of wander around, lather, rinse, repeat. Instead of wandering around Tokyo, they wander around the woods instead.
It’s equally all over the place in terms of what’s going on once things do get rolling. There are…evil spirits and a monk who supposedly murdered a bunch of children, and maybe the temple itself is evil, but once they finally get there (and get stuck overnight when Chris gets hurt because of course), suddenly it’s all just generic monsters and creepy ghost children (all shot in deep shadow so you can’t really tell what’s going on at all) and everyone ends up in a bad way all at once, and then in the present the mysterious patient (whose identity is never revealed conclusively) leaps up and attacks the interpreter and…that’s it. No closure, no revelations (except that a little boy was a ghost the whole time but…you kind of know that’s coming when he just shows up miles and miles and miles away from where he first shows up), no nothing. Just sort of a big pile of “BOO!” and then credits. It’s about an hour and ten minutes of wandering around aimlessly and everything happens in the last 20 minutes, almost like someone reminded the filmmakers that they were making a horror movie.
It feels like one of those movies where the filmmakers had a bunch of ideas or setpieces (none of which case are especially novel) and just sort of slapped them together. It’s a bunch of parts connected by the thinnest of rationales, there’s no mood, no atmosphere, everything feels artificial, and maybe the best thing I can say for it is that it doesn’t look cheap. Which just means a budget larger than a shoestring was wasted on this.
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