SXSW Film Review: Never After Dark

Everyone has wished at some point or other that they just be given the space to get their job done.

Airi (Moeka Hoshi, Shōgun) is a freelance exorcist who has one very simple rule: She needs to be alone in the house when she’s performing the ritual. Well, apart from her sister (Kurumi Inagaki), but ghosts don’t really count. It’s the living who are the real distraction, so she and her dead sibling tend to have the house to themselves as they unpack exactly why the unquiet spirit won’t just get on with whatever awaits them on the other side.

The idea that the dead are harmless and it’s the living you have to watch out for is at the heart of Never After Dark, the new Japanese horror from writer/director Dave Boyle and producer Kento Kaku. For this South by Southwest -selected Midnighter, the duo behind Netflix’s House of Ninja eschew the contemporary post-J-Horror trends towards gore and extremity. Instead, they invoke a tone more in keeping with earlier pioneers of the genre like Kaneto Shindô (Onibaba) or Masaki Kobayashi (Kwaidan). It’s that sense of oppression born of sickly  dread, combined with the idea that the supernatural is more part of nature than we would like to think.

It’s a major inconvenience for Airi that the living won’t get out of the way and let her get on with her job. After all, it’s another fairly simple exorcism, this time at an empty hotel that the owner wants “cleaning.” However, the owner and her estate agent and the cops and even a mysterious former guest keep popping by and making Airi’s job impossible. There’s a constant tragedy to the way Airi has created a career of sorts that allows her to remain connected with her sister, but only through uncanny means: a looking glass, a rearview mirror, anything that provides a glimpse but no real contact. Who, one wonders, is truly haunting who as she wanders the halls of this empty inn where melancholy and shadows have settled like dust. As Airi breaks with a slight grin into another beer left in the fridge for her, her solitude clings to her like a blanket. It’s a shame, and soon a menace, that she has to deal with all these people and their unstated agendas.

Boyle isn’t about a certain grisliness, as portended by the discovery of a mysterious cache of human teeth. But what makes Never After Dark genuinely intriguing is its subtle subversions of the conventions of Japanese haunting stories. It’s cold and coiled, like a snake in autumn, and its slow crawl towards a surprisingly violent end never seems less than earned or inevitable.

Never After Dark Midnighter, World Premiere Monday 16, 9:45pm, Alamo Lamar Wednesday 18, 10:15pm, Alamo Lamar Find more of The Austin Chronicle’s continuing coverage of SXSW.

The post SXSW Film Review: Never After Dark appeared first on The Austin Chronicle.