Technological anxiety was at the heart of millennial J-horror, but perhaps the more things change the more they stay the same. Takashi Shimizu’s latest ghost story Immersion (忌怪島／きかいじま, Kikaijima) sees a grudge-bearing spirit cross over from the virtual world neatly suggesting we take our monsters with us into our simulacra and to that extent the brave new world is not so new at all. Then again, the hero thinks he desires a private world but paradoxically wants to share it and eventually discovers that what he craves is connection.
Tomohiko (Daigo Nishihata) has accepted a job as a programmer helping to build a new virtual world exactly replicating a remote island. He is greeted by his boss, Ide, in the digital space, but shortly after his arrival discovers that she died some time previously along side a man she may have been experimenting on in a project exploring brain syncronicity. When Tomohiko enters the virtual world he is confronted by strange and dangerous visions which suggest there’s a threatening bug in the system. Soon enough, the data breaks loose and somehow awakens in our world.
What no one knows is how a vengeful ghost got in the machine in the first place, though a shinto priestess later likens the new digital space to the “over there”, a perfect simulacrum of our world existing on another plane where spirits and their victims gather. Then again, it seems the problems are mainly on this side with an old man mocked by children and shunned by society because his mother suffered some kind of mental illness and was filled with a lust that was taboo at the time. The man’s mother is linked to the legend of Imajin, a slave raped by her master whose wife then took against her causing her to become a vengeful spirit who drove people out of their minds.
The purpose of the new world Tomohiko is creating isn’t clear, but it’s certainly very well resourced. The implication seems to be that the virtual is already haunting us and we can’t be sure of what we’re “really” experiencing and what we’ve been primed to experience. Tomohiko increases “the reality” of the virtual space by coding to it to activate “real” sense memories such as the smell of the sea or the feel of the sand. He can’t be sure if he’s the ghost in this world or the other while remaining aloof and diffident, unable to communicate effectively with his teammates. Tamaki, the estranged daughter of the dead man asks him if he doesn’t like people, to which he has no real answer though she replies that she doesn’t really like them either. What he realises is that doesn’t really want a world of solitude, but to be with others though it seems it might not matter whether in a “real” or virtual space.
But in contrast to all this modernity, the island is a traditional community with a strong interest in shamanistic lore and ritual. Tomohiko says he doesn’t really believe in any of that stuff, but is still prepared to go along with the shamaness’ advice in order confine the vengeful spirit to another world even if it means sacrificing the virtual space they are trying to build. Perhaps the message is that this kind of technological advance is dangerous and hubristic, unleashing forces we are ill-equipped to understand and would not be able to quell. As the shaman implies, you have to close the door from this side and not the other, which is a serious problem for the engineers who find themselves struggling to destroy the portal of a Torii gate in both spaces while the ghost continues to wreak watery vengeance.
Shimizu conjures an atmosphere of lurking dread in which digital ghosts haunt us in reflections of the ancient past even as our reality is destabilised by the overlay of the virtual. Tamaki reflects that the island is like a ghost town with few figures on the streets save themselves though they too sometimes appear like lingering spirits. What they discover may be a kind of refuge or escape, but perhaps not in the way we might expect while vengeful ghosts aren’t quite so easy to exorcise as they might once have been.
Immersion screened as part of this year’s London East Asia Film Festival.
Original trailer (no subtitles)
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