Something is strange in the Japanese town of Kurouzu-cho. Kirie Goshima notices something off when she encounters her boyfriend’s father staring intently and filming a snail on a wall. Soon, it becomes clear that something is dreadfully wrong. Spirals… it seems as if spirals seem to be infecting the town. For Kirie, it seems as if something sinister was bubbling over. What are these spirals, why this town, and why are so many people seemingly infected with spirals?
First things first: I going to try and avoid comparisons to to Junji Ito’s original work as much as possible because I want to approach this as “what if I had seen this back in 2006?” as I wouldn’t have been aware of Ito at the time.
Without further ado…
Uzumaki, or Spiral (depending on your location, when you might have seen it, and whether or not the film goes by the original Japanese release title or the original English translated title), is an… odd movie. I can’t really say that it’s a *good* film. There’s some interesting ideas, and they do a great job at making it uncomfortable to watch at times… in a good way. There’s some really discordant music that doesn’t always fit with the tone of the scene (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing), extreme close-ups, weird camera angles and movements. There are times when it’s effective, and others when it just doesn’t work. This is essentially the story with this movie… for the most part.
For example, there’s a scene where the female protagonist is walking down the halls of her school with her friend after something strange happened. As they walk along, there are students lining the walls, just standing there with their heads down. The two girls are oblivious, and it’s kind of unnerving.
Another unfortunate part of this film is that there’s just so much that seems to be missing. Considering that this is an adaptation of a graphic novel that’s as thick as Harry Potter 5, it makes sense they would have to cut out a lot to fit within a movie runtime, but there’s a lot that is left unexplained. They even changed the ending from the book into something so ridiculous and abrupt as to be hilarious. I didn’t really like the ending of the original graphic novel, but it was much better than what the filmmaker came up with.
Another issue I have with the film has to do with the male protagonist. He looks like a 40 year old Japanese businessman who has absolutely no charisma. I take that back, he has negative charisma. And that haircut… He is completely out of place, and it’s so awkward seeing the leads together. In fact, there’s more passion in the actors playing the minor characters.
His costar does well enough with the material that she’s given, and she looks like she’s generally giving good effort and trying her best with the material. Had her costar been at least as invested as the minor characters in the film, Uzumaki would had been so much better for it.
Ultimately, there were some interesting ideas that ultimately failed to work together. Many of the concepts completely failed because of the very low budget which leads to some of the effects looking like Kai’s Power Goo. I get what they were going for, but it just looks goofy, especially over a decade and a half later. That’s the challenge of trying to adapt Ito’s works. His artwork is so intricate that adaptations have proven to be troublesome. And that ending comes so completely out of nowhere that I literally said, “What?!?” as it happened.
I wonder what I would have thought about the film in my youth. It’s certainly much much much better than Kaidan (not to be confused with the academy award-winning Kwaidan), but it’s ultimately just not that good or even that remarkable or memorable of a film. Would I have a fondness for it like I do those early 2000’s K-horror films? I might have just based on some of the cool concepts. Now? I’d rather just read the manga.
Adventures in Korea 