‘This Man’ Is a Deadly Serious Horror Thriller, and It’s All the More Hilarious Because of It
This film’s most valuable player? The person in charge of the English subtitles.
People are dying. Violent, cruel deaths. Some by accident, others by their own hand, and the most unlucky among them are being brutally slaughtered by the people they love most. Or by complete strangers. Oh, and some just cough up blood and die. Ten people. Fifty. Thousands. It’s an epidemic of unexplained deaths, and the police can find only two connections between the victims. They’ve all undergone some degree of psychiatric help, and they’ve all dreamed about the same man in the hours, days, weeks before they died. Well, forget about the psychiatry angle, but the guy with the unibrow? Yeah, he’s the constant. Haunting their dreams as he hides in their bed or stands in their kitchen peeling carrots. Yeah, that man. This Man.
Art is subjective, and there’s no truer statement about movies than that. Anything any of us says about the movies we love or the films we loathe is simply an opinion. Your favorite film of all time is hated by someone else, and that movie you just shit on is held near and dear by another person. It’s one of the many beautiful things about art, about the movies, and talking about those opinions — both shared and opposing — can often lead someone to finding an appreciation that they didn’t initially feel. There’s a real joy that comes from that experience, from opening someone’s eyes to why you love a film that they just didn’t vibe with, and from helping them appreciate what they see as a “bad” movie as something good, entertaining, thought-provoking, and/or ultimately unforgettable.
I will not be able to do that for you when it comes to the new Japanese horror/thriller, This Man. I want to. Trust me, I really and truly want you to see this film and to love it as much as I do. I want to convince you that everything — from its flat performances and even flatter cinematography, to its nonsensical narrative and editing choices that see every scene go on three minutes longer than they should — that all of it is intentional, purposeful, and deserving of your praise. I want to convince you, to excite you, to encourage you to seek out this accidental masterpiece. This is my Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959), The Room (2003), and Birdemic: Shock and Terror (2010). I don’t subscribe to the idea that a movie can be “so bad it’s good,” but This Man, a film that seems incompetent at nearly every level, is also among the most purely entertaining and hilarious movies of the year.
Writer/director Tomojirô Amano probably intended for his latest film to be a serious horror thriller. I say probably because I have a sneaking suspicion, despite the movie being played straight by everyone involved, that it’s actually a secret comedy. I say secret because no one else seems to be in on it, from the stone-faced cast to the cinematographer lighting every scene with the same overhead ceiling fan. While the film’s themes halfheartedly explore our collective subconscious and ineffectiveness of authority, the ugly, underlying truth it’s laying down is a near blackly comic observation that we are the most selfish and self-centered species on the planet.
People are dying by the thousands — the government has even distributed suicide pills so people can pass peacefully instead of slicing their own skin off or whatever — and we discover that this man’s “rampage” from the spirit world can be halted if just one person sacrifices themselves and descends into hell with him. Just one. But nobody bites, and the body count climbs to the tens of thousands. A young couple find out that a quick, three-minute chant can move the curse off them and onto a stranger, and they immediately say “do it!” only to realize too late that this man’s unibrow was a monkey’s paw in disguise. Two feuding shamans in disagreement over who’s the strongest, reveal that they could have stopped this man cold by simply putting aside those differences and sharing another quick chant, but they’ll share a laugh about that later. Turns out this man, the guy raising his one, caterpillar-like brow to signal every emotion, is just pointing out the truth that we all already know. We suck!
That, or my second theory is that the person tasked with creating the English subtitles went rogue. Tossed the script aside, maybe didn’t even know Japanese to begin with, and just wrote some of the funniest, most comedically deadpan dialogue to hit the screen since Mel Brooks’ one-two punch in 1974 of Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein. To be clear, This Man is neither of those films. There are no obvious jokes here, no intentional punchlines or visual gags meant to elicit big laughs and happy grins, no comedically gifted performers earning laughs from their mere presence. There is no comedy in This Man.
Unless there is?
The 28th edition of the Fantasia International Film Festival runs July 18th to August 4th in beautiful Montreal, Quebec. Follow along with our coverage here.
