The Complex

Hassouna Mansouri checks in from Amsterdam to report on Nakata Hideo’s new film, who returns to his Japanese roots with horror film The Complex.

With The Complex, Nakata Hideo confirms his mastery of the horror genre. Since his debut in 1998 with Ringu, the Japanese director showed that he definitely made his choice for this genre as a path. After a detour through the western world, where several of his films were remade in English, Nakata now returns to his Japanese roots. The story takes place somewhere in a Japanese neighbourhood where a young woman needs to be exorcised. As usual, Nakata builds his fantastical atmosphere on the idea of a fluctuating border between two worlds. It is through the organization of this va-et-vient between here and there in terms of time and space that he manipulates the spectator and his emotions.

We all know that feeling of déjà-vu, those moments when you have the feeling that what you are seeing and hearing has happened already at another time in your life. You can’t say when or where precisely, but you’re sure it has happened before. Some people see it as a remnant from another life. Others seek biological neuro-scientific explanations in the workings of our memory, our neurones. The Japanese filmmaker uses these ideas and mechanisms as an invisible thread, a throughline for his screenplay. The multiplication of these moments of confusion between time and space leads to a progressive transition from this world to the world of death.

The moment when the borderline between the two worlds becomes obvious is the key moment in a fantastical story. In most films the events begin in our world in order to shape the other at a certain moment. The Complex begins the other way round.

At the beginning of the film Asuka is already hijacked in the world of death. The first scenes show her with her parents and her brother. In a very subtle way, Nakata puts some signs that you hardly notice (but that are supposed to be seen) to show that something is wrong with what we see. The young girl starts to notice that her parents pronounce the same words every time they have breakfast. The same scene is repeated many times, with small variations in every repetition.

Asuka has the feeling that her parents say the same things at different moments, but in fact her consciousness is reproducing a single moment from her life to which she is particularly attached. The first anomaly of getting out of ‘normal’ life is when you understand that time is no longer linear but circular.

At that point, the fight between two logics starts. The first one takes you to the future; the other one brings you back to the past. In fact, past and future aren’t that different anymore. A force pulls you to that undistinguished moment when you are very close to entering the other world. Does it matter whether this moment belongs to the past or to the future? It is definitely out of time.

For Asuka, this moment came thirteen years ago (time of life), when she was the only survivor of a strange accident that claimed forty victims. The story of the film is structured by different moments of articulation between the two timelines. Every moment Asuka has a vision of the past is a call to join the other world. Every vision is an opening in the wall separating the two worlds. The more frequent these visions become, the more this wall becomes transparent, the more eminent the shift to the world of death gets, and the more emotional the sphere of the film becomes.

Horror is a feeling that the director develops according to a certain dosage of interaction between this world and the other world. The appearance of Asuka’s family is more like nostalgic remembrance. Mr. Shinosaky shows the path and disappears. The presence of the kid Minoru grows in an imperceptible manner until becoming very threatening to the life of the young woman. These different characters lead Asuka to her end, but she is nice to all of them. Surprisingly, the film is not built on the dichotomy between good and evil, but on the opposition between life and death, presented as a cold and merciless relationship with no margin for any feelings.

Perhaps Nakata has a pessimist vision of our life. From our point of view, Asuka survived the accident in which all her family members died. But from another perspective, this moment is not over. While the young woman lived on physically, psychologically she stayed precisely at that moment, hanging between this world and the one where her family has gone.

It’s not only a question of time, it’s also about space. Asuka is enclosed from everywhere. Wherever she goes, she comes face to face with incarnations of death. The fact that she is drawn to Mr. Shinosaky, her old neighbour, and Minoru, her mysterious young friend whom she alone sees, is a translation of this link to the ‘somewhere else’ where she belongs psychologically. She feels irresistibly attracted to the old man because he is about to die. She naturally follows the little boy because of the strange circumstances of his death. Even the young man Sasahara, whom she knows because he works in the cleaning company that took care of the apartment of Mr. Shinozaki, feels easily acquainted to her because he, too, has a connection to death: his girlfriend is in a deep coma after an accident. As she is physically hanging between life and death, he does too, because of the strong relationship he has with her.

Nakata Hideo gives a psychological interpretation of the uncanny. He translates it cinematographically in a very special way to deal with time and space. He uses the codes of the horror genre in order to visualize the projection of one onto the other. The cadence he gives to these shifting moments during the story is the main trick up his sleeve to enhance all kind of feelings — fear, sympathy, horror, and suffocation. The shift in time according to visions from the past are projections in the future, the same as these doors and walls which are not as opaque as the border seems to be between the two worlds. Death, even though it i hard to admit, is nothing more than a moment where time such as we know it doesn’t exist, or a location that is penetrable from that side and the other — unlike our beliefs.

Hassouna Mansouri is a film critic and writer based in Amsterdam. He’s a columnist for Eutopia Institute, correspondent for Nation Media Group and the author of several books on cinema: De l’identité (Tunisia, 2000) and L’image confisquée (The Netherlands, 2010). He recently published his third book, They Will Not Represent Themselves… (Belgium, 2012).