Rampo Noir
directed by Akio Jissôji, Atsushi Kaneko, Hisayasu Satô, Suguru Takeuchi
starring Tadanobu Asano, Mikako Ichikawa
Arrow Video
Normally proclaiming a horror writer as Japan’s Edgar Allan Poe would come across as uninspired and lazy shorthand, in the case of Edogawa Rampo, it is actually quite apt. Not only does Edogawa Rampo function as the touchstone of modern horror and mystery literature in Japan, but the author and critic Hirai Tarō’s pen name, Edogawa Rampo (“Ranpo” is also seen), is simply a play on the Japanese pronunciation of Edgar Allan Poe. Writing from the 1920s through the 1950s Edogawa’s short stories and novels not only plumbed the depths of of the horrific and macabre, but like his other great idol, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, he was a master of the detective genre with his eccentric, genius detective Kogoro Akechi, who’s cases often involve the supernatural, but are solved using Kogoro’s reason and intellect.
Arrow Video has released a feature laden Blu-ray of the 2005 anthology film Rampo Noir which adapts four of Edogawa Rampo’s stories to the screen in all their delicious weirdness. Four film directors, Akio Jissoji, Atsushi Kaneko, Hisayasu Satō, and Suguru Takeuchi, collaborated, bringing Mars Canal, Mirror Hell, Caterpillar, and Crawling Bugs to the screen. The stories are linked, not through a formal framing device, but through the presence of actor Tadanobu Asano, who appears in all of the segments, including a turn as Detective Kogoro Akechi.
Mars Canal is a visual tone poem that forces the viewer to sit in silence with its unnamed protagonist as he wanders a desolate landscape, grappling with the difficult memories of his (presumed) dead lover. The silence is complete to the point that a first time viewer is likely to assume there is a fault with the disc or their system. It is an extremely unsettling piece that succinctly sets the tone for the rest of the film.
The stark melancholy doesn’t last, as Mars Canal gives way to the pulpy Kogoro Akechi detective story, Mirror Hell. Kogoro Akechi steps in to aid the baffled police in a string of mysterious deaths of women, leaving them with horribly burnt faces, the culprit being a series of cursed hand mirrors. Mirror Hell is by far the most accessible of the stories in Rampo Noir, as its detective story grounds the tale in a conventional story structure.
Body horror and bizarre sexual power plays form one of Rampo’s most famous stories, Caterpillar. A war hero returns to his wife as a quadruple amputee. She is sole caregiver, and her love for her husband continues but turns dark as she delights in torturing him. As the wife becomes more sadistic, more secrets about their relationship are revealed.
In Crawling Bugs, a chauffeur becomes obsessed with the actress he drives for romantic rendezvous. The driver is unable to make attachments to people due to an affliction where he imagines them teeming with maggots and insects. His obsession reaches critical mass, and he abducts the actress and keeps her prisoner in a beautiful garden where the bugs cannot get to her. The garden of course is all in the driver’s imagination, and eventually the fantasy world he created shatters, unveiling the horror of reality into his perfect world.
Surrealism courses through the film in the structure of the stories, the visuals, and even the clashing styles of the four directors and adds layers of artifice and unreality. The film is pervasively weird, yet undeniably beautiful, and at times rather shocking even for horror fans. The difficulty is that the film feels distant from the audience, perhaps too reverent to the source material. It feels more like something to be appreciated than something to love. Despite having all the elements for a horror masterpiece, it remains slightly out of reach, which is fitting with the stories chosen for adaptation, as they all deal with characters frustrated by that which they cannot obtain or keep.
Rampo Noir is a finely staged and ambitious piece of Japanese horror cinema, but despite amazing style, it misses some of the human connection to make it one of those rare films that burrows into your psyche.
