J-horror auteur Kurosawa serves up his own, creepier version of Inception
In Real, Kurosawa expounds on his
eternal themes in his return to the horror genre by way of
Christopher Nolan’s Inception. With the help of experimental
technology, a man enters the dream life of his wife, a manga artist
and author, in order to extricate her from her year-long coma.
While the Nolan film was an exercise in
expounding (and multiplying) Chuang-tzu’s paradox about the dreamer
and the dream, Kurosawa’s film comes into its after own the first
expository first act when the rescue mission narrative is subverted,
deconstructed, and deformed into a psychological thriller. What if
the dreamer doesn’t want to stop dreaming, for example? What lies
behind every dream and within the subconscious mind but sublimated
guilt, horror, and malice?
It’s a concept that should work well,
except that Real is hampered by an over-long first act which is
played entirely too straight. It’s only after a good half hour that
Real stops feeling less like a low budget clone of Inception and more
like a classic Kurosawa piece once the quiet menace takes over. And
from then on, it’s a really good psychological horror piece.
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