This slowly paced supernatural drama suffers from poor plotting, reliance on the unlikeliest of coincidences not explained by the supernaturalism, & from two characters, husband & wife, making wildly unlikely decisions that result in the needless death of a child.
The story of accidentally kidnapping a child then letting the obviously girl child die after smothering her a couple of times to keep her from yelling for help was just such a stupid, stupid story. If they'd been retarded adults maybe they couldn't think better than that. If they'd been escapees from a mental asylum. But they weren't.
Then there's the clunky plot element of the husband being a sound FX engineer who we're given every reason to believe could record the sound of ghosts, but doing so never hooks up to the main story at any point. Also the premise that someone with authentic psychic powers would go to such extremes to fake psychic powers in order to not feel ordinary never quite made sense.
The film opens with a didactic dialogue about doppelgangers which has nothing at all to do with the main part of the story, but a doppelganger does momentarily appear at one point of the story, & is summarily set on fire. It was vaguely interesting but it had nothing to do with anything, though it seems to have inspired Kiyoshi Kurosawa's slightly less tedious thriller, Doppelganger.
Some of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's glacially poky films have effective weird climaxes (as in the case of Dark Water) even if the films are otherwise boring. But Seance has no particular climax; it just runs its course then ends. Even the title is a bit wrong, as the idea of a seance is marginal to anything that happens.
Searching for anything good to say about this film, what it has is a serious art-house tone. The child ghost's haunting the "unintentionally" murderous couple, & the appearance of the ghost in red in the diner, were nice haunting images. The acting is fine, though wasted. Koji Yakusho (of Shohei Imamura's Eel) is one of Japan's best actors; director Kiyoshi Kurosawa often uses Yakusho's talents to help patch over bad scripts with good acting. Co-star Jun Fubuki as the psychic wife is also very good as a performer, doing a champion job of selling mediocre material.
copyright © by Paghat the Ratgirl
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