The Deadlier Groundhog

What bonding experience could be better than a shared, ultraviolent nightmare? 2022's Karada Sagashi (カラダ探し, "Looking for a body") is the live action adaptation of a popular horror manga that started in 2011 that's already had an anime adaptation. This one, though, plays up similarities to It to capitalise on the popularity of the new It movies in Japan. The trailer even explicitly references the fact that the film comes from Warner Brothers, the same studio that produced It. Karada Sagashi isn't a great horror movie, its sentimentality is conspicuously artificial at times, and it's obviously derivative. But it's not really bad, either. I like the monster, the stars are cute, and I was genuinely rooting for them.

It's a bit like It meets Groundhog Day. A quiet, pretty girl named Asuka (Kanna Hashimoto) is the point of view character. One night, she goes to bed and finds herself dreaming she's in her high school with five of her classmates. All of them are butchered, one by one, by a bloody little girl they call "Akaihito", "The Red Person". They all wake up to repeat the previous day, only the six of them aware of the time loop and remembering previous versions of the day.

This leads to tonally very odd scenes of the teens cavorting at the beach or laughing together over fruit parfaits. I think we're meant to be enjoying their freedom and camaraderie but they're too perfectly pretty and the scenes are as artificial as McDonalds commercials. Since one of them is a nerd and one of them is quiet, I think they're supposed to be kind of a Breakfast Club but they just come off as the most obnoxious clique in the school. To say nothing of the fact that they take this new supernatural horror in their lives pretty lightly.

It feels very much like a video game and I think that's why it appeals to so many young viewers. It reflects the real experience of kids to-day. There's nothing so out of the way about a group of kids bonding over getting killed repeatedly in a dream world after school. That's basically your average MMORPG. And, eventually, they figure out they need to find the parts of the Red Person's body hidden throughout the school and assemble them in a nearby church, a pretty standard fetch quest. And after a certain number of parts are found, the Red Person merges with her ragdoll to become a boss monster. This monster's face opens like the Demogorgon (or like Pennywise) and when it swallows one of the kids, that kid's existence is erased from reality. The next day, the remaining members of the clique find no-one else remembers the suddenly absent student.

I liked the look of the boss monster. It seemed to be mainly practical effects, a big suit with long arms and neck. The film also has a couple of new songs by Ado, a popular singer with a nice voice.