Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Seance

Koji and Junko Sato are a married couple living a quiet, modest life. Koji (Koji Yakusho) works as a sound effects recorder for television; Junko (Jun Fubuki) works from home as a medium. Their respective careers will come to involve them in quite the life-changing event.

A psychology graduate student at the local university has been trying to convince his both his professor that very real psychic abilities can be used to help police with investigations. A young girl is kidnapped and though the police apprehend a suspect, he is unconscious and unable to lead them to the girl.

Ironically enough, the girl has escaped from her captor and hidden in one of Koji's equipment cases as he records wind sounds in the woods. Koji unknowingly takes the girl home with him where she stays in the box for over a day until Junko senses her presence. Kurosawa creates incredible tension in this part of the film as Koji and Junko go about their day, unaware of what is in the garage.

When they do find the girl, she is miraculously alive, but instead of handing her over to the authorities, Junko has another idea, one that could help legitimize her abilities and not stigmatize her any longer. Form this point on, the plan naturally goes awry and the couple find their plot spiraling out of control.

What makes Seance (2000) work is the sympathy built up for Junko. She is very much troubled by her talent/affliction, and would like nothing more than for people to not view her as a head case. Early in the film, she goes back to work for the first time in a long while. While waiting tables at a restaurant, she sees the ghostly apparition of a young woman following a business man. After just one day back, she realizes that she cannot work in a place where any chance encounter could bring about a vision. As she leaves the restaurant that day, the other waitresses watch her from the window with what we surmise is a combination of pity and condensation. When the opportunity presents itself for Junko to prove that she can use her ability constructively, and show nonbelievers she is not crazy, she takes it.

It is a classic case of desperate people in an extreme situation and making decisions with clouded judgement. All Junko wants is too assert her place in society, to establish a sense of being in the here and now. This theme is a recurrent one for Kurosawa, one that appears in varying degrees several of his other movies, particularly Cure and Charisma.

Yakusho and especially Fubuki are both excellent as the married couple in over their heads with a plot that will result in nothing but otherworldly guilt and fear. Kurosawa always pays great attention to sound in his films, and Koji job as an effects recorder makes us focus even more than usual on the soundtrack, with one sounds effect late in the movie causing one hell of a chill. Gary Ashiya score fluctuates between the drones he created for Cure and Howard Shore-like moody strings, plus one theme that is so unexpected musically that the already surreal sequence it accompanies becomes even more unnerving.

Filmed for Japanese television, Seance is presented by Home Vision Entertainment on dvd it its original 1.33 aspect ratio. The picture is very good, if not quite as much so as that of their releases of Cure and Charisma. Sound is fine: Kurosawa uses silence as strongly as the actual presence of audio, and the track accommodates nicely. There is a ten-minute interview with the director (culled from the same session as the othe HVE discs), liner notes by Gabe Klinger, and trailers for all three films the company has released thus far.