RAIRU SUGITA IN MISSING CHILD VIDEOTAPERYOTA KONDO: MISSING CHILD VIDEOTAPE (2024) New York Asian Film Festival 2025A. tasty and promising understated Japan horror debutA Letterboxd writer, not the only one writing with enthusiasm but most succinctly, says of this film simply "Our guy has studied Kiyoshi Kurosawa, and studied him well."
With its boxy format, intensified color, and long final nighttime passage,
missing Child Videotape is an elegant, exquisitely simple new iteraton of the classic Japanese horror genre (backed by J-horror legend Takashi Shimizu). Another Letterboxd contributor, more voluble, calls this film "aggressively restrained" and finds it to be "just adamantly refusing to lean into scares" for "90% of the run," "just letting you sit in silence and static cameras" as "people are broken with loss and the impossibiity of closure" oppressed by how media "becomes some kind of prison of memory." If this is a feature debut, they enthuse, there's "no doubt" he's going to be "a big name in horror."
I don't know about that, but I didn't want it to end. Chill and disquiet mingled pleasurably with a considerable amount of aesthetic satisfaction. The film is a delight to the eye. Initially drab-seeming, it comes to downright painterly iimages later on, making a strking use of bright crimson, and the two young men are given a porcelain doll quality in some carefully composed scenes, set off within the film's "perfect rectangle" format. Along with that it pursues mood and character and eschews jump scares, and moves along a clearly discernible storyline to a satisfyigly unnerving conclusion. Naturally, some won't think it gives them enough of a jolt. Not all genre fans appreciate subtlety.
The use of scratchy video and mysterious recording shows Kondo's faithfulness to traditional means. One thinks of
The Blair Witch Project - and it emerges from the director's
interview with Katie Rife on
RogerEbrert.com, he was thinking of it too. According to James Hadfield, writing about this new film in
The Japan Times, Kiyoshi Kurosawa recently commented that " the problem with today’s digital imaging technology is that it’s too darn clean." There is immense evocativeness and scariness in scratchy, creaky, blinking and beeping that you get from film or worn out amateur videotape. That is one of the initial inspirations of this fine new Japanese horror fllm referred to in the very title
Missing Child Videotape and its opening incident. And there is really no greater fear, no worse horror, for families than a missing child who is never found. It is a lingering pain, a festering wound like no other. And the tape does that to the protagonist.
The tape is sent to Keita (Rairu Sugita), who as first seen in the woods has a hauntingly mask-like, almost doll-like face, described in
Genkinaito, a Japanese movie website, as "a 20-something who splits his time between a supermarket job and mountain rescue." It has been sent by Keita's estranged (and ultimately very scary) mother. It's one Keita himself shot as a boy climbing a death trap mountain 13 years ago, in a building that later can't be located, at the very moment when, playing hide and seek, his little brother Hirata disappeared, never to be found. At the opening scene Keita is in a woods and finds a boy who has been missing in the present day. This false foreshadowing of the central trauma will be no comfort to Keita.
Mikoto Kuzumi (So Morita), young woman reporter for a newspaper located in rural Gunma Prefecture where the tragic event occurred on Mount Hinata, is preparing a piece about the disappearance of Hirata. (This mountain forest turns out tobe also a dumping ground for funeral urns and (as Hadfield puts it) "other unwanted spiritual baggage"). She will be third in a trio of main characters whose other member is Keita's roommate (and Hadfield says "probable boyfriend") Tsukasa (Amon Hirai), a thin young man with stylish hair. Tsukasa is a cram-school teacher, but also possesses psychic powers, and sees dead people. Eventually Keita, Tsukasa, and Mikoto will wind up at Mount Hinata but not before Keita has revisited home and seen, spectrally, his mother. (That is when we get to the 10% of the film the Letterboxd writer calls "more explicitly allowing scares" and says "had my heart in my throat.")
The general idea of the very central "missing child videotape" is the resurfacing of long-buried trauma, trauma for Keita escaped in the 13 years since in the woodland rescues and the crowded anonymity of a lowly supermarket job, that slowly crescendo and are accompanied by new horrific events. The style of this kind of movie is chilly, and out of the ground of that chilliness to give us chills, a process ironically referrred to sometimes as a "slow burn." There's something essentially Japanese in this relating to the culture's understatement and restraint, which makes people sometimes seem, to an external observer, like automatons, or, as suggested here, porcelain dolls; and we know how traditinally scary dolls are in American horror films. The reliable creep of analog media - with the disturbing videotape shown a full ten minutes early in this film to set its special creepy mood - is agugmented later on by the arrival of an audio cassette left behind by a group of hikers who vanished in the same area where Hindada disappeared.
While Kondo has been widely acknowledged to be on his way to greatness in the genre, not all viewers have been utterly delighted, but these kinds of films don't score every time for every fan. In my own experience nothing has come up to the theatrical thrill of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's
Cure, seen in far-off 1997, before I was writing reviews. I never got much out of Hideo Nakata’s
The Ring (1998), and its successors, though they provide a legacy to which this new film obviusly nods. But for me, coming in he rich variety of the 2025 NYAFF,
Missing Child Videotape stands satisfyingly alone and by itself. Granted, though a brilliant calling card for the filmmaker, the film can be awfully quiet and slow at times. But open your eyes: its beauty will offset that.
Ryota Kondo's short film "Missing Child Videotape," which served as the basis for his feature film, won the Grand Prize at Kadokawa's 2022 Japanese Horror Film Competition. The screenplay was penned based on Ryota Kondo story idea by Kaneko Suzuyuki, and the dp was Matsuda Kota. Stay for the closing credits and a chilling use of child voices in the score by Temma Teje.
Missing Child Videotape ミッシング・チャイルド・ビデオテープ ("Misshingu Chairudo Bideote-p")」, 104 mins., premiered at Tokyo Oct. 30, 2024. Also seen at TIFF. Screened for this review as part of the July. 11-17 2025 New York Asian Film Festival.
SCHEDULE:
Sunday July 13, 9:00pm
LOOK Cinemas W57
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