It is always hard to judge the tone of foreign films, especially when they move inside realms of cultural conventions, and the direction Kurosawa Kiyoshi has headed ever since his most overt comedy after Cure brought him international attention, Doppelganger, has been somewhat difficult to discern. His last film, Loft seemed to indulge, often quite genuinely but just as often with a knowingly outlandish attitude, in all the genre clichés that the director has been usually so good at spinning on their head, casting them in a grim, socially serious light. His newest feature, produced by J-horror veteran Ichise Takashige, also seems, on the surface at least, to regress to a dependence on some of the stupidity of contemporary horror trends. Retribution bares some considerable resemblance to Pulse, the last Kurosawa movie that so boldly trod the path of convention. Here that convention is mostly in the ghostly appearance of a lady in red, haunting police detective Yoshioka (Kurosawa regular Yakusho Kôji) and essentially chanting throughout “let me rest peace! Solve the mystery of my death!” The question is less a matter of what the director’s intention than was than if—and how—Retribution can use such inanity to a powerful effect.

One may roll one’s eyes at yet another appearance of a lithe, pale young woman whose dark hair obscures her features as she lurks around corners waiting for her unforgivable past to be put into perspective by the haunted, but thankfully Kurosawa is actively utilizing his own somewhat hackneyed material. A master at turning pulp genre material into deeply metaphysical pictures of withering social ailment, in a script he wrote himself Kurosawa combines the detective film and the ghost story to fashion a picture about the horror of timelessness, of a society losing connection to one another and gradually, vengefully beset by a forgotten past. Like Pulse before it, and echoed in many of the director’s other films, this is an apocalyptic cinema, taking the contemporary world and evacuating it of all life but that of the protagonist and his concerns, society itself is but a ghostly whisper in the background, in the process of being extinguished without anyone even noticing. The film opens brilliantly with a random murder—the woman in red, drowned in a pool of salt water on the Tokyo waterfront—and upon finding a series of disconcerting clues Yoshioka realizes that the only viable suspect is himself. The only problem is he doesn’t remember a thing. More murders appear with the same drowning by salt water M.O., and since the later perpetrators are all surprisingly easily to find (Yoshioka only has to look up to accidentally bump into one) a serial killer is ruled out and the detective is stuck agonizing over an unsolvable crime that only points to him. It is at this point he starts seeing the victim everywhere he goes.

Around this bizarre starting point Kurosawa mobilizes his inspired sense of natural locations and dramatic locale by setting much of the drama on the landfill waterfront of Tokyo, where new buildings are demolished, new complexes constructed, earthquakes strike often, and the stability of old housing and the ground itself is questionable. As always, Kurosawa thrillingly constructs his locations in the most temporary of spaces. Everything looks quasi-industrial, having an exposed quality to the décor that is as if scrounging humans only just found these empty buildings or old muddy lots and have temporarily taken them over to make civilization—housing, police precincts, and psychiatric offices. This air of temporariness, of carving out social spaces as if they were ugly and unnatural grafts onto an empty and perhaps alien landscape fills even the most regular space with entrenched dread, and Retribution’s tight focus on the queasy, unnatural landfill waterfront provides a truly disquieting and literally unstable location for Yoshioka’s growing psychosis. But the film’s most difficult attribute is its tonal unease in trying to express Yoshioka’s haunting. One moment the director is clearly poking fun at the character and the scenario—sending him to the police psychiatrist because he is seeing ghosts, or in the way he keeps accidentally finding the murderers—which takes a slippery tongue-in-cheek approach to both the narrative conventions of horror cinema as well as almost radically dismissing supposedly “important” elements of the plot, such as the perpetrators of the murders and Yoshioka’s troubled psychology. But then in the next moment Retribution is indulging in those clichéd visions of ghostly, beautiful females floating unnaturally around every corner and behind every mirror, crying out for our detective hero to look into the past and find where the real guilt lays.

Unlike in Loft, Kurosawa does not seem to be going for direct, out-dated scare tactics. Instead, he seems to be mobilizing these regular visions of J-horror not for their fear factor but rather for a kind of surrealism bordering on the lyrical. Scared at first, Yoshioka quickly starts questioning his apparition, linking it to the murders, and linking it to his own mysterious sense of guilt. The apparition becomes less and less a figure of fear as it becomes more a figure of uncertainty, and, like the earthquakes prevalent through the film, of an instability that extends beyond the social regularity of murders. In combining the detective tale with the horror film Kurosawa has the film start with a seemingly everyday element of society—a series of crimes—and absorbs it into a larger metaphysical element that expands the problem outside of the realm of the easily-explained police procedural. This expansion is into time itself, finding in a search for the blurry past (see the dreamily obscured and deliberately fake back projection used during any of the film’s driving scenes) a greater, wider cause of the ails of the present. This is Kurosawa’s operating in a mode similar to that of Fritz Lang, fueling his protagonist with a wild, unexplainable oppression of guilt, and slowly building a pattern that ripples out of the detective’s own tightly wound existence into the history of society itself, connecting murders between totally unconnected people, to himself, to strangers, other places, and other times. Interestingly, “society” here means not just the personal and the human (again, dipping down into the realm of cliché, the apparition is haunting people because the she was mistreated in an institution years ago) but also literally in the structures society builds for themselves, here emblematized in the dynamic of the Tokyo waterfront.

Like Lang’s The Blue Gardenia, this film opens up the irrational possibility that our protagonist is in fact a murderer. But while Lang’s film located the murder in a missing gap of memory in the middle of his film, in Kurosawa’s scenario cinema Yoshioka’s entire past is a blank, as if he only started living and working at the very moment the film began. His potential guilt flows back and covers a whole unseen, mysterious lifetime. In a similar vein, the only real contact he has other than in the police precinct, a young woman who is his remote, erstwhile girlfriend (Konishi Manami), seems to have drifted into his life after so much time has passed between the two that their current life is nothing but an empty shell of grunts and wispy silences. This lack of a past in the film, emblematized by Yoshioka’s bewildered self-questioning about a murder he thinks he never did, weighs heavily on the mise-en-scène. This is Kurosawa at his most apocalyptic, portraying a contemporary world that seems decaying in its last days as it etches out an existence amidst the industrial detritus of the previous world. At the same time, the world is also utterly of an instant, foolishly built to withstand only a moment and cursed and beset by the ills of the real world—and their inextricable ties to the past—leaking in to turn it uncanny, throw it out of wack, and corrode it from in the inside out. This world imagines all aspects of the present are tied to a bigger picture, almost unseen, and located in the presence of the past. This presence may be literal and physical, like the buildings on the waterfront, but more often than not it takes the form of the uncanny, especially in Kursawa’s long takes, editing that disrupts continuity, and a creepy use of mirrors and off-screen space to continually suggest a mysterious openness beyond what is on camera. Kurosawa takes the metaphysical approach to this leaking of the past and funnels a subdued terror about the violence and miscommunication in modern urban life through the ghost story, realizing that all problems have their sources, however small, in the past, and which worsen and reveal themselves over time. The horror film semantics no longer appear scary because they are being mobilized to express forlorn symptoms of a morose social illness. And social ills (and vague ones at that) coming back so overtly to haunt our protagonist does indeed seem a bit hokey, as it is an overused staple of the ghost story, and Kurosawa’s weakness for having his scripts say out loud what they are also saying subtly does unintentionally render Yoshioka’s haunted instability somewhat ridiculous. But at the same time the horror is more melancholy than anything else, the woman is a vision of untenable wretchedness rather than terror. The woman had gone forgotten and unnoticed, and from there Kurosawa builds the surrealism of the past directly and randomly imprinting the present, causing deep incongruity and pushing Yoshioka—and the film—beyond the facts of the genre into a beguiling, if uneven, expression of social woe.