Marebito – 7/10

Marebito is a surreal, and literate, little film. It’s also really bloody hard to describe.  One’s never quite sure what the true reality of the situation is meant to be. Mythology, science fiction history, mental health – the film touches on a variety of subjects as it explores its narrative.

It’s a movie I should have found irritating in the non-focused way it approaches its ideas, but instead I found things to be quite the opposite. It made me curious as to what the answers were, and the fact that it kept giving me different possibilities actually worked for it instead of against it. So many films will throw out multiple possibilities in an effort to appear clever. This was a film that I genuinely believed to be a bit clever, and to have more than a passing knowledge of the material it was referencing.

It has its nasty moments, but those are less the point than the strangeness of the world the main character inhabits, and our changing ideas as to what is happening and why. I get that it could be cosmic horror, but it could also be a tale of madness, of mythology intruding into the real world, of prophecy…

I can see that it wouldn’t work for some folks, but for me it was intriguing right to the end, and is one I shall certainly rewatch at some point.

For links to the list of other cosmic horror films I’ve been watching, go here.