Shaky Foundation
Junichi Ishikawa’s first foray into horror starts strong but tumbles down the stairs in the second half.
The Floor Plan
Director: Junichi Ishikawa • Writer: Kentaro Ushio, based on the book by Uketsu
Starring: Shotaro Mamiya, Jiro Sato, Rina Kawaei, DJ Matsunaga, Miori Takimoto, Koji Ishizaka
Japan • 1hr 50mins
Opens Hong Kong May 30 • IIB
Grade: C+
Are YouTube and/or social the last, great, unexploited sources of material for the movies? History, mythology, books, comics, drama, radio, television, toys, video games and of course movies themselves have all been exploited for film adaptations since the dawn of the movies. Zola, based on a Twitter thread, kind of broke that barrier in 2020 by spinning a viral thread into millennial sex worker road trip adventure, though it did come a full decade after the execrable CBS TV adaptation of Justin Halpern's Twitter feed Shit My Dad Says: $#*! My Dad Says (c’mon, it’s network television). Is this the final frontier?
If not final at least maybe next, if Japan’s first box office hit of the year, The Floor Plan | 変な家 AKA A Strange House (thank Christ they changed that name) is any indication (it’s since been passed by Detective Conan: The Million-Dollar Pentagram). Based on a popular YouTube channel (?) wherein a be-masked host takes a deep dive into a strangely laid out Tokyo house, the 20-minute… doc? Experiment? Vlog? has been already been spun off into other media. The film expands the original concept, and in fairness it starts strong. It’s suitably mysterious and ominous but it eventually goes all-in on cult nonsense, at one point throwing off big Onpaku energy (I think that’s the second time this week and that’s not a good thing at all). Scripter Kentaro Ushio loses all sense of identity by the mid-point, and don’t start me on the complete lack of narrative logic. Talk about losing the plot. Like so much horror these days (Night Swim, The Exorcist: Believer, Imaginary), The Floor Plan is notable for having a terrific but entirely wasted/blown concept.
Yes, it’s a house
Rainman (Shotaro Mamiya, Tokyo Revengers, bland) is a minor YouTuber who specialises in all things supernatural, and his latest “investigation” revolves around the strange floor-plan of the house his manager, Yanaoka (DJ Matsunaga), is thinking of buying. The duo thinks a juicy conspiracy will get them some much-needed clicks, and so Rainman, whose real name is Amemiya, looks into the structural inconsistencies. Seriously though, does anything speak to Hongkongers more than real estate horror (Dream Home, Coffin Homes)? The prime oddity is a unmarked space in the middle of the house between a kitchen, hallway and an enclosed bedroom (which could also be for E&M or trunking but whatever), which Amemiya asks his architect and occult buff buddy, Kurihara (Jiro Sato), about.
Things seem relatively “hide the bodies” about the house, but then Yuzuki (Rina Kawaei) shows up with more details about it. Some time before, her husband vanished quite suddenly, his body turning up just as suddenly in the woods near their home in Saitama – a home that has the same kind of structure glitch as the one Amemiya’s investigating. Dun dun dun! But wait, Yuzuki isn’t who she says she is, and there’s way more to her story than she coughs up at first. Before you know it, all three are off to the wilds of Japan to find Yuzuki’s missing sister (!) and stop a child sacrifice (!!). Or something.
And therein lies the rub. The Floor Plan starts as one film and ends as another – which is not an unforgivable sin in horror. Yuzuki’s enigmatic nature is just, well, enigmatic enough to pique our interest (Kawaei really leans into shady), and as Amemiya and Kurihara slowly peel back the layers on the two houses the mystery deepens, pleasantly. When Kurihara figures out Yuzuki’s lying and calls Amemiya to warn him, there’s some classic “They’re inside the house!” tension to the scene, and more low simmer suspense would have been welcome. And that’s the less forgivable sin. No one seems to want to leave anything on a low simmer anymore, and so the back half of the film fixates on being an overly-complex and thoroughly muddled curse thriller, where it’s impossible to determine who’s cursed, why they’re cursed, and how to lift it. What’s that got to do with the house, now? So many questions.
Director Junichi Ishikawa has a long list of TV credits to his name, those and a couple of equally high concept comedies: the ping pong rom-com Mix and the self-explanatory April Fools. Not surprisingly there’s a flat, serial aesthetic and pace in full force here, and it has three endings too many. It’s a shame, really, because The Floor Plan started so promisingly, with the potential to say something horrifying about small urban spaces and their impact on us. When I think about you’re probably better off just watching the YouTube clip. It’ll only take 20 minutes too. — DEK