Bonus Ghosts

A comedian attempts to kickstart his career by staying in haunted apartments in 2020's Stigmatised Properties (事故物件). This is the part where I might say, "He gets more than he bargains for," but he doesn't, really. He went to the places knowing they were haunted and, sure enough, they were. The film begins with kind of an interesting tone and the leads are cute but ultimately Stigmatised Properties feels too rote and artificial to generate any sense of life.

The film begins with Yamame (Kazuya Kamenashi) and his partner, Nakai (Koji Seto), performing an oddly vaudevillian routine with an umbrella.

Yamame is in drag and the whole audience is stone faced and motionless, which is really odd for a Japanese audience. I'd expect some courtesy applause. It's the first of many artificial moments designed to move the plot forward.

The only person in the audience who laughs is a young woman named Azusa (Nao Honda) who, it turns out, is such a fan of the duo, she has a little shrine of them at home. She's thrilled when Yamame gives her the umbrella used in the act.

This is intriguing and a bit creepy but it's never followed up on. But Honda is one of the best parts of the film. She's cute and I really like her plaid overcoat.

This movie is initially set in Osaka, which was fun for me to see so many familiar locations. A lot of it also takes place in Kyoto. In the final act, Yamame travels to Tokyo, away from his two friends, but both of them show up with melodramatic timing anyway. That's just one of the things that deflates the climax.

The movie's filled with cheap jump scares but once ghosts start sticking around for more than two seconds they rapidly lose their punch, mostly because director Hideo Nakata can't manage to authentically explore the emotions of such a situation. Yamame is supposedly living in these apartments but we never see him struggling to sleep after a ghost encounter. It's like everyone knows the ghosts will only come on cue.

Stigmatised Properties is available on Netflix in Japan.