About a Place in the Kinki Region

It probably sounds absurd to describe a film in which terrified journalists are visited by their bleeding, mutilated doppelgangers as cosy but writer-director Kōji Shiraishi's About a Place in the Kinki Region is so steeped in curated creepiness and abandoned, old-world rhythms that it cannot help but evoke these strange notes of comfort. When a writer for the Japanese equivalent of Fortean Times goes missing with an important deadline looming, freelancer and friend to the departed Chihiro, played by former pop idol Miho Kanno, is brought in to complete the ailing magazine's centrepiece feature. This salvage job demands Chihiro sink into a well-stocked basement and rummage through notes and dusty physical media, each containing fragments of apparently unconnected paranormal phenomena. Cinematographer Futa Takagi's camera then returning, again and again, to beatific images of CD-Rs adorned with post-it notes and VHS tapes that clatter into video cassette recorders connected to rolling, blue screens. In an era of algorithms and high-definition streaming, where all the world's horrors feel so close and instantly (or unwittingly) attainable, that these short, eerie episodes - the viewing of which accounts for a significant portion of this film's first half - are physically constrained and therefore denied that kind of free-flowing accessibility actually feels unusually comforting. This case unravels in such a way that our snooping leads have to deliberately access each individual breadcrumb if they are to advance to the next stage of this haunting, implicating and endangering themselves by the specific act of trying to understand any overarching objective. With that in mind, Kanno's Chihiro is the perfect character to centre this kind of story around - a fearless reporter who is not only unusually determined to see this story through but behaves as if she is, actually, completely immune.