Seance

A-

Directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Those of you who read my blog already know that I'm a big fan of Kiyoshi Kurosawa and think that his entire body of work up to the present stacks up to almost any other Asian director currently making movies. His ability to create suspenseful, eery films that are nevertheless beautifully shot and multi-layered to an extent almost unheard of in contemporary film is reason enough to get exited when I run accross any Kuroswa film, even a movie like "Seance" which is widely recognized as one of his lesser works.

Kurosawa regular Koji Yakusho plays the role of Sato, a sound engineering leading what appears to be a boringly normal life with his wife Junco, who happens to be a psychic. All appears to be well, albeit it extremely non-eventful, in Sato and Junco's life until they accidently get embroilled in a kidnapping of a local girl gone awry. Rather than reacting trhe way a normal couple would, however, an contacting the authorities with information on the whereabouts of the girl, Junco convinces Sato to devise a scheme which will allow her to showcase her psychic "powers" to the world.

"Seance" is far less complex and also far inferior to Kurosawa's masterwork of suspense, "The Cure" but that doesn't meant that it doesn't have plenty to offer in its own right. Like all of Kurosawa's films, "Seance" is imbued with a creepy mood that is anchored not by creepy music or black bait and switch set pieces but rather through a sophisticated mix of sound and image, giving "Seance" the same type of cold, supernatural aura of films such as "The Cure" and "Doppelganger." "Seance" also follows the Kurosawa mold of peering into the darker corners of the minds of "normal" people, not to reveal them as heartless agents of evil but rather to remind viewers that normality often masks the possibility, if not the willingess, of commiting acts of evil.