Review of the film Kairo (2001)

kairo is a horror movie, but not the kind anyone fed a steady stream of cheap hollywood horror simulcrums would expect. similarities to Kubrick's The Shining (not King's, dear god not King's) are certainly in order, if not in content or directorial flair then in mood and atmosphere. they both come from the same area in the murky depths of the mind.

it is not like a ghost jumping out at you from behind a corner, startling you temporarily and then wearing off. it is like sitting in a quiet, dimly-lit room reading a book, and noticing a vague figure in a chair in the corner. you're not quite sure how long it's been there, but the cold realization slowly soaks in after squinting to try and distinguish its features that it is your father's corpse with a rictus-like grin. it is not a movie where, while driving home from the theater with a friend, you make snide remarks about "when that zombie leapt out from the closet at the guy and made him shit his pants" or "when that ghost suddenly vomited blood into the guy's mouth." it is a movie where, while driving home from the theater with a friend, you sit in uncomfortable, silent contemplation, as though you just came from a funeral. upon returning, you feel afraid to go in and go to sleep -- not because there might be something inside, but because the world might not exist when you wake up.

in kairo, death is manifested as a penultimate depression and loss of will to live, offering little in the way of hope for what may lie beyond. if ever there was a horror movie that could be described as depressive, it is this. the setting could be described as progressively apocalyptic, but -- save for one or two scenes -- not in a "decimated by war" sort of way, a "life turning inward and fading out" way. the director, like many of his contemporaries, requires the viewer to unlearn the standard hollywood tropes for plot, pacing and character development for full enjoyment.

the main plot element, the thing that was done up for the marketing of the (worthless) 2006 remake, is that of technology suddenly becoming a channel for spirits and otherworldly apparitions. here, it's used tastefully as (in my opinion) commentary on the irony of communication technology breeding alienation and thereby dejection and desperation for human contact. it may also reflect the director's bleak prognosis of the human species (a view arguably shared by Kubrick). however, whenever films such as these are made, that prognosis gets some minute measure less grim.