Shot on digital video in just eight days, Marebito is Japanese director Shimizu's yin to the yang of his glossy American horror film, The Grudge (which itself was a remake of Shimizu's 2003 Japanese film Ju-on: The Grudge). While The Grudge relied on fancy effects and jump moments for its scares, Marebito is both more ponderous and more crude, with few conventional scares and effects that look cheap and often fake, especially in the harsh glare of digital video.
The film starts with one of the prevalent themes of Japanese horror—the obsession with technology. Tsukamoto plays Masuoka, a freelance Tokyo cameraman who is driven to capture extreme fear on video. He becomes fascinated with footage of a terrified man stabbing himself in the eye, and sets out to find what scared the man so. What he discovers is a bizarre netherworld underneath the city, populated by strange creatures and accessible only to those who truly know terror.
Or something. It's never quite clear, and the movie isn't about the underground world, anyway. It's about a vampire-like creature (Miyashita) that Masuoka finds there and brings back to his apartment, where he cares for her like a pet and names her F. F isn't like a conventional vampire, but she does thrive on blood. Or maybe she doesn't, and it's all in Masuoka's head. Shimizu is deliberately vague throughout the film, and even when it appears that things are explained, there's another twist that throws everything off again.
If it were to work, Marebito would have to succeed as a dream-like thriller that floats along on atmosphere and philosophical rambling, but any profound statement that Shimizu is making gets lost in translation, if it was ever there in the first place. The fake-looking blood, blocky camera work and ridiculously cheesy creatures and landscapes in the underground world are at odds with the film's heady tone, and serve only as a reminder of how silly the whole thing is. Once you realize that the plot doesn't make sense, either, all that's left is Miyashita's unnerving, cat-like performance, which is adrift in a movie too confused to support it.