Uzumaki (Spiral, 2000)
Zombos Says: Excellent
As Shuichi’s father says, “One brings forth one’s own uzumaki!” in this dark glimpse into Lovecraftian terror and looming doom. Uzumaki is director Higuchinsky’s cinematic distillation of in-need-of-therapy Jungi Ito’s three volume, manga-sized descent into madness and chaos. The town of Kurozu-cho is beset by spirals, spinning the lives and minds of the townspeople, and changing them in ghastly ways. Higuchinsky captures the grotesque and arabesque images of Ito’s manga by using tightly framed, sharply angled views, tinted green to accentuate the weirdness. There’s a panoply of bread and butter cinematography used to contrast against the spiral terror: tracking shots, panning shots, close-ups, and hazy, ghostly faces appear and fade. CGI spirals twirling in unexpected places on the screen also appear throughout the movie.
The story begins as flashback, told by Kirie (Eriko Hatsune), a young girl who sees the effects of the curse descending on her small, isolated town by the water. A gust of wind scatters leaves around her, startling her into remembering. Or is she forgetting? The mesmerizing vortex is never-ending, and perhaps Higuchinsky is telling us Kirie is caught in a larger one of time, folding over and over on itself in repetition, trapping her and her town by its endless looping.
Shuichi (Fhi Fan), Kirie’s morose, since-childhood, boyfriend tells her of his fears the town is beset by a curse of spirals. His father (Ren Ohsugi), consumed with thoughts of them, becomes an early victim. Kirie sees him filming a snail. He ignores her. He begins to ignore everything except the spiral pattern he seeks out. He steals the hair salon’s spiraling sign and devours spiral noodles. A startling transformation, before a more physically terminal one, shows him exerting his own uzumaki by impossibly spiraling his eyes after seeking the pattern is no longer satisfying.
More victims follow as Kirie’s classmates succumb to physical transformations with some turning into slimy human snails, another girl vainly sports a new hairdo of enormous black spirals imbued with their own life, and a boy committing suicide splatters at the foot of the school’s spiral staircase. Someone remarks how happy his broken, blood-smeared face looks in death.
Spiraling out of control deaths escalate: first perplexed by Shuichi’s father’s enfatuation with spirals, Kirie’s own father (Taro Suwa), a pottery maker, becomes enthralled with the swirling clay to his detriment; Shuichi’s mother (Keiko Takahashi) collapses at the funeral for his father when she sees his face spiraling in the sky against swirling curls of smoke rising from the crematorium. She goes mad and cuts off her hair and fingertips to eliminate looking at anything resembling a spiral; an unwanted suitor for Kirie fatally wraps himself around a moving car’s wheel; and even Shuichi finally succumbs to the twisting madness permeating the sky, the ground, and eventually everyone. Even the tunnel leading into the town becomes useless, twisting on itself so no one can leave or enter.
A news reporter hunts down tantalizing clues for the curse involving serpents, mirrors, and Dragonfly Pond, the possible source of the growing otherworldliness. These hints at the cause for the bedevilment descending on the town ultimately tease but never explain. Various elements from the trilogy are here, but the final revelation of the curse, and its more visually gruesome encounters such as Umbilical Cord ( in volume 2) and The Scar (volume 1) are missing in this evocative Lovecraftian horror. That’s a shame. Uzumaki captures the manga mood of Ito’s spiral horrors so well, to see these additional terrors onscreen would have been like tasting the rich icing on a moist red velvet cake touched with cinnamon: sickeningly sweet but damn satisfying.