Haze (2005)

User Rating:

6.9/10   

Director:

Shinya Tsukamoto

Writer:

Shinya Tsukamoto (written by)

Genre:

Horror | Mystery

Tagline:

You will experience the palpable feeling of terror and all encompassing sense of claustrophobia as you watch this intense exercise in basic fear and dread...

Plot:

A man wakes up to find himself locked in a tiny, cramped concrete room, in which he can barely move...

Plot Keywords:

Surrealism | Claustrophobia | Maze | Survival | Escape

Cast

Shinya Tsukamoto		(as Shin'ya Tsukamoto)
Takahiro Murase
Takahiro Kandaka
Masato Tsujioka
Mao Saito		(as Mao Saitô)
Kaori Fujii

Runtime:

49 min | Korea:24 min (Jeonju Film Festival) | Argentina:49 min (Mar del Plata Film Festival)

Country:

Japan

Language:

Japanese

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

1.78 : 1

Sound Mix:

Stereo

Certification:

Argentina:Unrated | UK:15 | Germany:18 | Italy:VM14

Trivia:

The shooting of the film lasted only 13 days.

Disturbing ambiguous nightmare, or maybe not...

Coming close to completing my collection of all the Shinya Tsukamoto movies, and this one is pretty hard to explain. A man wakes up in somekind of a concrete space, hardly able to move, and notices he has an injury which is bleeding. It's very dark, and you only see his face for quite a while and hear him think to himself about what is going on. He begins to crawl through tunnels, or maybe a maze, and comes across a woman also trapped and bleeding. Different visions occurs, like a force knocking on a huge door which he can't seem to reach, and multilated bodies floating on the surface of a source of water in this space. They begin a conversation about life, dreams, death, and what is happening to each other, and how to escape. He wonders if the world is at war and they are prisoners, or some pervert has locked them away for whatever reason, or is it really a very nasty nightmare or are they in hell. That's pretty much what is going on, at least for what you can see, because the movie is pretty dark until the last 10 minutes or so. Although the movie is only around 49 minutes long, that is plenty long enough for this type of ambiguous narrative. Being a huge fan of Tsukamoto, this movie to me is like a terrible nightmare, and that may be what it is, you have to judge that because the movie doesn't help you along much at all. But what there is that is so Tsukamoto, is the superior use of music and sound effects, along with some disturbing visuals. Interesting movie to say the least, and a must-have of course for Tsukamoto fans.