Plot so thin, it passes unnoticed.

brilliant actors, brilliant editing

Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

It's a mild crowd pleaser for people who are exhausted by blockbusters.

Also known as 'The Stranger from Afar', this Japanese horror film focuses on a freelance photographer who rescues a naked woman chained to a rock in a subway tunnel; he takes her home, only to discover that she is more animalistic than human with a taste for blood. The film is pretty much as weird as it sounds with little indication of just how much of what occurs is hallucination, imaginary or real. It remains a gripping ride though even when everything cannot be deciphered thanks to a truckload of atmosphere and a genuinely unsettling turn by Tomomi Miyashita as the mysterious woman. Some of the symbolism hits home quite well too with the protagonist viewing himself as a vampire, feeding off filming the misery and pain of others (sort of like Jake Gyllenhaal's character in 'Nightcrawler', but with a moral compass here). The film also taps into some curious territory early on as the protagonist announces a desire to find what caused a man to be so terrified that he committed suicide before his camera lens; some of his soliloquies in this early part of the film bring to mind 'Videodrome' as he equates cameras to the retinas of human eyes. One's mileage with 'Marebito' will no doubt vary depending on one's tolerance for the unexplained and deliberate ambiguity, but it is certainly refreshingly different from most other vampire movies out there.

Shin'ya Tsukamoto stars as a camera man who witnesses a man's suicide in the subway tunnels and becomes driven to find out what drove him to it. He finds tunnels under the subway station that lead to an ancient city, where he finds a young naked woman chained to a wall. He takes her home with him, but cannot get her to speak or eat. He discovers that her only diet is blood, and soon he's killing women and bringing their blood home for her. Nothing at all is what it seems to be in this film. It was shot in 8 days on digital video between Shimizu's direction of "Ju-On: The Grudge" and it's American remake. I like it ... everything has a sense of terrible foreboding.

This sounded very interesting to me in an abstract/visual experiment kind of way when I read about it. Man takes a movie camera to the subway of Tokyo in search of unspeakable horrors and comes up with some to take back to his apartment. I love movies that take a peripatetic approach, that take us on walkabouts through weird/elaborate architecture, from The Shining to Last Year at Marienbad, and I hoped this would be one of the greats.I like these films to be shot in DV, lights are harsh and cold and space attains an immediacy that appeals to me. If I was disappointed in this then it's not because it meanders and is short on plot but rather because the lovely visual experiment is used by Shimizu to tell a story of almost EC Comics simplicity, madness and damnation. The protagonist sees news footage of a man stabbing his eye in the Tokyo subway. The epiphany to go looking in the subway for that ultimate terror gleaming in the victim's eyes moments before his death comes seemingly after a quick mashup of superimposed images of video screens, white noise, and reaction shots of the character looking dazed - a visual slapdash chaos that seems like the director's way of saying "something clicked in his mind" and nothing more.I like that Shimizu simply took a camera to the streets of Tokyo to make Marebito, we really don't see enough films of that kind by people who know how to make them, and I wish he would've used Hollow Earth as a springboard of ideas instead of making direct allusions to it. I was fascinated by the subject in my teens, as with other mystical theories I'm still shocked that there are people who take it at face value, as something more than interesting myth (Shimizu fortunately is not one of them), yet the discussion in the subway tunnel where a bunch of arcane references to the subject are bandied up serves nothing. I'm still glad that I saw it though, made me want to see some more Shinya Tsukamoto.In the end, Marebito is about a man's struggle with his own madness, but it's a bit slapdash about telling us about it.

This movie started off really well, with lots of adventure and the cinematography is great. This movie was done 8 days before Ju-On and I would say that the director did a decent job. There was suspense in the beginning. After the cameraman brought the girl home, he starts to find out more about her and starts to buy new clothes. He found out that the girl feeds on blood and does whatever it takes to obtain blood from her. The first 2/3 of the movie started off well, but the last 1/3 of this movie was not that good. I could not understand what was happening during the last 1/3 of the movie at all. Lots of questions just come to my mind at the end of this movie. Why was the cameraman insane? Why did he kill all his family members? I could not really get what happened in the end? Why was he terrified and why was his face red? In addition, around the last 1/3 of this movie I started to feel like I am watching a movie about someone doing whatever it takes to find food for his pet (only exception is that the girl eats blood) and starts to get quite uninteresting. However, the good points of the film is that the imagery at the beginning of this movie and the mystery of this movie was done very well. The place where the cameraman found the girl and try to find out more facts about that girl by checking her teeth buying clothes for her to wear. There is quite a lot of emotion between the characters in this film. This film is really beautiful at the beginning and the middle but gets very complicating and slightly uninteresting towards the end. Still recommended if you want to watch a film that is original though. Score: 7.7/10