Minor Horror #4: Tsuburo no gara

This is the fourth in a series of fifteen pieces on “minor” horror films that I’m going to be publishing here throughout October. For more information, please see this post.

Tsuburo no gara (Masafumi Yamada, 2004)

Tsuburo no gara is the kind of horror movie that is called a “horror movie” because we don’t yet have a term for what it actually is. It bears a certain resemblance to the mystic allegory, to the automatic narrative of classical Surrealism, to the fable or fairy tale – but it claims no telos, it maintains fealty to a warped rationality, it teaches no clear moral lesson. In so far as it can be described as horrific, it is the kind of horror derived not from that which is “scary” but that which “feels wrong” – an altogether distinct category, much subtler, much more treacherous ground.

Superficially, one could mistake it for a thriller of the “confined space” variety – the great majority of its slim runtime is spent in a concrete bunker, with a cot, some sheets of plastic, dripping pipes, flickering lights, an old rotary telephone, the kind that would sit on the desk in an office, and two figures, a nurse and a patient, or, more essentially, a woman and a man. The door is locked, the walls are thick, it seems deep underground, hot, wet – there are echoes in the pipes, or is it someone banging on the other end? How did the nurse get here? She seems to have just arrived. What about the patient, with the weird metal armature screwed into his back, some sort of abstract bondage, chewing mouthfuls of pills, biting into his hand, dreaming of snails, saying he’s always been here? What will happen to them? This could be the idiosyncratic setup for an otherwise essentially conventional thriller, a matter of escape, of investigation and problem-solving, of “uncovering the mystery”, but of course it is not. Tsuburo no gara is not a thriller because it does not thrill. Its mode is that of inevitability, fatalism, this-is-the-only-way-it-could-be; light on plot development, heavy on concrete and metal and eddying fog, drips and clangs and distant sirens, vague spirals. Scenes have a tendency to trail off into nothing, conversation meaningless, action useless, the default a kind of barren persistence akin to that found within Beckett’s shambling husks. Which is not to say nothing happens, quite a bit does, there are numerous surprising interludes, changes of scenery, but when the action moves beyond the concrete room it does not feel like an escape but a continuation of the same twilight nightmare, the same desolate limbo, overseen by no creator, no God. Nominally, the film can be linked to Japanese cyberpunk, a dubiously meaningful category at the best of times, but here especially strained: there’s very little “punk”, no anarchic vitality, and not that much “cyber” either, just the thing on the patient’s back which, yes, sure, no doubt owes a debt to Tsukamoto, but we’re pretty deep in the weeds here. What Tsuburo no gara is is an empire of stagnant puddles, a universe of subterranean corridors, a planet that hides from its sun. It is not that it comes from nowhere, so much as it offers you nowhere to go.