Well Worn
Everyone’s favourite Damp, stringy-haired spirit crawls out of her well for a typically needless, Digitally minded reboot.
Sadako DX
Director: Hisashi Kimura • Writer: Yuya Takahashi, based on the novel by Koji Suzuki
Starring: Fuka Koshiba, Hiroyuki Ikeuchi, Kazuma Kawamura, Mario Kuroba, Yuki Yagi, Naomi Nishida, Hiroyuki Watanabe
Japan • 1hr 40mins
Opens Hong Kong December 8 • IIB
Grade: C+
At this point in time, Hideo Nakata’s 1998 Ring and the franchise it gave birth to has a main villain up there with Freddy Krueger and Michael Myers among towering bogeypersons. Sadako, the straggle-haired, pasty-skinned contortionist who comes through the television monitor has become a template for countless horror antagonists to follow, chief among them Ju-On’s Kayako. The franchise even got its own AVP: Alien vs. Predator, or Freddy vs. Jason, in 2016 with Sadako vs. Kayako, which is a pretty good indication of just how exalted a place Ring holds in Japanese, likely global, horror canon.
But after nearly 25 years, Sadako, like many of her brethren, has become a cliché. So director Hisashi Kimura and writer Yuya Takahashi do their damnedest to freshen up the material and make it a bit more contemporary by injecting some light comedy and self-awareness à la Wes Craven’s Scream. Meta references are something of a novelty in Japanese horror, which is normally very, very serious about its vengeful spirits, and in Sadako DX | 貞子DX the meta-ness falls flat while the more interesting current themes are shunted off to the sidelines. Also? What the hell “DX” means is anyone’s guess. Digital Extreme? Digital Experience? Same for our heroine’s bizarre recall gestures. Huh? Why?
Where Sadako DX sits within the Ring timeline is curious at best, but given the viral angle it’s safe to say it’s now. Nonetheless the VHS tape still plays a major role. In Kimura’s new iteration, someone has dug up the old cursed tape and started circulating it on the mythic dark web, quickly becoming the cinema’s go-to social scourge. People are dropping dead mysteriously, and everyone is wondering if the curse has returned. To discuss this pressing issue, genius grad student Ayaka Ichijo (Fuka Koshiba, Kiki’s Delivery Service) takes her 200 IQ onto a talk show (no, seriously, her IQ is mentioned more than a few times, though there’s no demonstration of Ayaka’s smarts beyond her being unusually observant and rote memorisation skills) alongside fortune teller and psychic Master Kenshin (Hiroyuki Ikeuchi, Cheang Pou-soi’s Limbo). She’s the sceptic, he’s the shady huckster peddling mystical nonsense to desperate clientele. It seems the seven-day curse has been condensed in the rapid, digital age to 24 hours, a mutated virus as it were. Ayaka keeps poo-pooing the curse idea – though her “take-down” of Kenshin on TV is weak tea – until her sister Futaba (Yuki Yagi) and mom Chieko (Naomi Nishida) wind up watching A TAPE and are targeted by Sadako. Why are our victims this time around not watching YouTube?
Still with the VHS
Genius
Bottom line: Sadako DX is not scary, and its light-hearted joking and self-conscious gags get tired fast. The constant callbacks designed to appeal to the target millennial audiences – “What’s a VCR?” a young woman scrolling on her phone asks some friends – are half-assed at best, and the panicked reactions by Ayaka’s investigating partner, Oji Maeda (The Rampage’s Kazuma Kawamura) grow more irritating with each passing shriek. If their lack of chemistry was by design, it’s unclear what the end game was, particularly given his stalker-ish tendencies. If not, well, you can imagine how agonising siting through their shenanigans becomes. Then there’s the wasted potential of the tweaks Takahashi makes to the existing lore. Tapes are magically tailored to each viewer so Sadako comes out of her watery grave right outside the viewer’s home. That’s creepy, but not creepy enough. Ditto for the way Sadako initially takes the form of someone her victims know (shades of It Follows). And Kenshin’s own grift coming back to bite him in the ass is a concept that deserves more screen time. How many times have we read about some homophobic dickhead getting caught in a bathroom stall with another dude, or evangelical types getting busted “sinning” in exactly the ways they go on long screeds about? Kenshin being confronted with the curse he peddles is ripe for exploration, but gets short-changed in Sadako DX. Viral phenomena and misinformation are also fair game, and examining their power is gaining artistic traction, but Takahashi doesn’t commit to the idea. On top of that, the whole film looks like a backyard cheapie (Maeda’s girlfriend’s “death by bodily toss” is hilarious for all the wrong reasons), complete with muddy lighting (not moody, muddy), a clear lack of fluency in horror language and busted wigs that aren’t as funny as they should be. Maybe let’s not go back to the well, huh? — DEK