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Ghost Actress

1996, Movie, NR, 73 mins

Ghost Actress: Review

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Director Hideo Nakata's debut feature anticipates his chilling RING (1998) through the ghostly figure of a malevolent girl in white who haunts her victims through moving images. First-time director Tashio Murai (Yurie Yanagi) is making a WWII-era psychological thriller about two sisters, starring veteran actress Hitomi (Yasuyo Shirashima) as the elder and newcomer Saori (Kei Ishibashi) as the younger girl. As Murai screens one day's rushes, something unexpected appears on the screen: Instead of Saori and Hitomi walking down a hallway , there's a silent sequence in which an unknown actress screams in terror while behind her, a girl in white cackles maniacally; a little boy climbs a flight of menacing stairs; and, finally, a dusty door begins to creak open as the footage flickers to white. As if the very presence of this unshot footage weren't odd enough, Murai is convinced he's seen it before, on television when he was a child. He also recalls that it scared the hell out of him, though he can't remember exactly why. Murai's set is already tense: The story he's shooting not only resurrects memories of Japan's wartime past, but plunges the cast into a psychological swamp of cowardice, murder, madness and the suffocating relationship between displaced, motherless siblings. Studio 8, where they're shooting interiors, is gloomy and cavernous, overhung by a dusty maze of catwalks and rigging. Hitomi is battling with her agent, who didn't want her to take the role. A crew member claims to have seen a ghost and one of the actresses hears a disembodied voice repeating her lines. Murai's growing obsession with tracking down the mysterious footage makes him distracted and edgy, robbing him of sleep and undermining his concentration. Though the story comes to a slightly unsatisfying conclusion, Nakata works up an admirable atmosphere of quiet dread, never opting for a shock effect when he can send the hair up on your arms with a half-glimpsed shadow. leave a comment --Maitland McDonagh
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