Charisma

Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Actors: Koji Yakusho, Hiroyuki Ikeuchi, Jun Fubuki
Year Released: 1999
Genre: Horror, Drama
See Also: Cure, Seance

Ascribing the qualities of charisma to a tree is a strange notion, doubly so when that tree is scrawny and not much to look at. This paradox is at the heart of Charisma, the 1999 film by Japan's moodiest horror director, Kiyoshi Kurosawa. And while it's hard to tell where things are going sometimes, it's always an interesting ride.

Koji Yakusho (Shall We Dance?), Kurosawa's repeated choice for leading man, plays Goro Yabuike, a cop who's starting to lose it on the job. An unfortunate hesitation during a tense standoff with a gunman and a hostage leads to both of them dying, and to Yabuike being sent on leave. Inexplicably and seemingly without purpose, he wanders into a forest and gets lost.

Kurosawa is a master at mood, bringing to his films an overpowering sense of dread, and Charisma is no exception to this. Even with most of the film shot during the day, there's an oddness and otherworldliness to it that's remarkable. The most mundane things, like driving in a car, are given a sheen of strangeness through tricks like having the reflections of the trees passing overhead move at different speeds, so that the reflection on the front window is out of sync with the back. It's a subtle (and possibly unintentional) effect but one that adds to the overall surreality of the film.

The forest, as depicted by Kurosawa, is genuinely creepy, and the earlier scenes offer the most of what we could call traditional horror elements: a decomposing body hanging from a tree, a terrifying night visitor who steals Yabuike's soul, an overpowering sense of dread in the forest itself. When daylight breaks, we find things aren't as creepy as they seemed the night before, yet they're no less puzzling. Yabuike is caught in a sort of struggle between different groups living in or near the forest, all intent on controlling that tree, a sick, scrawny thing supported by scaffolding, propped up in the middle of an empty field.

Here Kurosawa changes course. Charisma becomes something of an eco-thriller, with the different groups—an environmental group working in the forest, a botanist and her strange sister, a former patient of a now-abandoned mental hospital—each having their own reason for wanting the tree. The tree does indeed have some sort of charismatic hold over them. Kiriyama, the former patient and caretaker of the tree, goes so far as to name it Charisma. Desire for control of the tree soon comes to a head, but that's not the end of the film. Kurosawa is after something else here than clear-cut (it's a tree joke—get it?) explanations. It's the journey rather than the destination that interests him. Indeed, the ending seems haphazardly tacked on, as if someone woke him from his reverie and told him he should wrap things up. A puzzling, surprising and thought-provoking film.

—Adam Douglas

Otaku alert: Kurosawa was a creative consultant on Ju-On: The Grudge.