It Comes (2018)
Japanese supernatural thriller by Tetsuya Nakashima. Nakashima is one of those off beat japanese directors. You know, the Sion Sono, Takashi Miike kind. All striking colors, ambivalent attitude towards genre, corny sense of humor and, more often than not, bouts of intense but somewhat cartoonish violence. This is the second movie of his I've seen, after his early 00's not-quite-lesbian comedy Kamikaze Girls, which I remember as a very charming little flick. It Comes is his most recent outing, having embraced a more gritty and violent, yet no less colorful and cartoony style of film in his latter career.
It Comes is a genre bending ghost story about a young family who find themselves haunted by a bloodthirsty demon. Sound like the premise of a horror movie, and that's what it's labelled as most places, but that description doesn't really do it justice. It's the sort of tonally erratic rollercoaster that is able to change genre at more or less the drop of a hat. It Comes is a movie that goes a lot of places and I will say, for how many places it goes, it is very succesful in keeping its themes straight.
At its heart, It Comes is a story about family life, the ghost story side of things being so intrinsically tied to it that it serves to complement its musings on marriage and parenthood, rather than intruding upon it. And, mind, it isn't exactly subtle about its treatment of these topics. It Comes presents us with a deadbeat dad more interested in projecting the image of an idyllic family life on the internet than actually putting in the work to live it, a mother who passes on her own childhood trauma to her daughter, and a demon summoned by a neglected child.
Most western film makers would treat this basic plot as the foundation for a slow paced, downbeat arthouse horror movie, Nakashima, on the other hand, decided to have a lot of fun with it. The movie shifts quickly from comically idyllic, and comically phony depictions of family life, scored by sentimental piano music, to foreboding dream sequences, to violent dismemberment, to scenes of domestic drama, to elaborate occultist rituals. It's also generally just one of the most colourful horror movies you are ever likely to see. What would be a tense chamber drama in other hands, Nakashima turns into a baroque expressionist romp going through all manners of unorthodox visuals, events and editing.
This approach might not appeal to everyone, as Nakashima's playfulness quite often crosses the line to indulgence, but it's in those indulgences in which It Comes finds some its most memorable moments and setpieces. The finale, dealing with a grand excorsism, puts most Hollywood productions to shame in terms of pure inventiveness. It's a movie that changes it main viewpoint protagonist about three times. It never settles into anything remotely approaching a predictable rythm or ever stops having fun with itself, but most importantly, despite all its formalist excesses, it never loses sight of what it's actually trying to say. And, you know, that's a balancing act I can respect.
It Comes is a playful, solidly written and very entertaining ghost story. I never found it very scary but it makes up for that in pure creativity and visual inventiveness. It dances through various different tones, viewpoints and genres with a gleeful energy that that makes it hard to not be engaged with it. It's an incredibly entertaining, if pulpy, little thriller about the demons of every day family life that ends in what has to be one of the most impressive visual setpieces ever put into this kind of movie. It's just generally a pretty good time.
. Missed the dinosaurs by about 40million years.:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc()/Dimetrodon8DB-20c051c6b4a14997aeb0863823461790.jpg)
