I’m an admitted Kiyoshi Kurosawa fanboy. Cure and Kairo are masterpieces of modern Japanese cinema as far as I’m concerned, and his films are generally wildly unique and visionary. He cut his teeth in the horror genre, and I was definitely looking forward to him revisiting the realm of the macabre with Loft, his first foray into straight-up horror in 4 years. Maybe I was expecting something completely different, but this fanboy has finally been truly disappointed by a K. Kurosawa film.

Reiko is a young writer whose early works have been immense hits with the critics, but weren’t best sellers. Her publisher has suggested she write a book that will be more mainstream and sales-friendly, and this has caused her much stress; So much so that she is constantly having coughing fits that are occasionally accompanied by spitting up black goop. No doctor can find out what is causing this, and Reiko believes that it’s due to the writing block she is currently enduring and the hustle of being in the big city. To remedy this, she decides to move out to an isolated house where she can write her book in peace with no outside stress to get in the way. One night, she observes a man carrying something that is shaped like a dead body into a building next door. Upon some investigation, she finds out the building is used by the local university for research, and that the man is named Yoshioka, an archeologist who has brought the remains of a mummy there for further study. Upon meeting one another and sparking a relationship, strange occurrences begin to manifest for both of them.

Kurosawa is a master of creating atmosphere, and his mastery is in full effect with Loft. The film sets a mood, much like some of his other works, through isolation and the seemingly mundane. By having his main characters live completely ordinary, even boring lives, it makes the occurrences of the supernatural all the more effective. The way Kurosawa seems to like to play with his characters heads just as he does his viewers is also present here. As the viewer, you really have no idea what is supposed to be genuinely happening in the narrative and what is just a figment of a characters imagination, and the characters on screen are in the same exact predicament. Everything that makes a Kurosawa horror film work is present here. So what exactly went wrong?

I believe Kurosawa, as the auteur that he is, is always looking to push the boundaries of what makes his films special. Certainly through all of his films there are similar themes, and as any fan of his can attest, you can easily tell when you’re watching a Kiyoshi Kurosawa film, but as evident in his output in the last 5 or so years, he’s not one to be pigeon-holed into a certain genre. So he tried to do something different with Loft. He clearly did not want this to be another straight horror film, and while I can argue all day about how none of his horror films are really straight horror in the first place, with tons of underlying themes and messages, at the end of the day they are clearly genre films, through and through. The way he attempts to make Loft more than just a film in the horror realm however just doesn’t work.

All of the elements that Kurosawa tries to work into this film seem to completely work against each other, and everything ends up a complete mish-mash of ideas. The romantic subplot between Reiko and Yoshioka seems completely awkward and forced. This subplot opens up another subplot about a girl that is haunting them, and may be buried somewhere on the property. Why Reiko is coughing up black goop is completely forgotten. And what does anything have to do with that mummy again? The feeling I got from the second half of the film was that of a stalled-out engine, one that Kurosawa was feverishly trying to start again but having no success at.

Rarely will you hear me say I think a director should rehash ideas, but this is one time where I would have been more than happy to see a director walk the common ground. But Kurosawa is not content with being unoriginal, and this film is clear evidence to that fact. Even though all of the pieces for a solid, moody horror film were there, he chose to gather all of those pieces together and then scatter them across the room. What came out was a film whose intentions I honestly didn’t get. Some claim the film to be a goof. I say that’s crap, as I doubt Kurosawa would waste his and everyone else’s time with something as frivolous as that. To me, it just feels like a film that Kurosawa wanted to make more ambitious than it really needed to be, and failed. Considering his mastery of filmmaking however, I wouldn’t be worried about what the future holds for him. This is nothing more than a speed bump for a director looking to expand his horizons.