Seance

Toronto International Film Festival Program Guide
2000

Seance
Kiyoshi Kurosawa
JAPAN, 2000
97 minutes Colour/35mm
Production Company: Kansai Telecasting Corporation
Executive Producer: Yasuyuki Uemura, Tekehiko Tanaka
Producer: Atsuyuki Simoda
Screenplay: Tetsuya Ohishi, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, based on the original work by Mark McShane Cinematographer: Takahide Shibanushi
Editor: Junichi Kikuchi
Production Designer: Tomoyuki Maruo
Sound: Makio Ika
Music: Gary Ashiya
Principal Cast: Koji Yakusho, Jun Fubuki, Sanagi, Ittoku Kishibe
Production: Kansai Telecasting

Any casual student of recent Japanese cinema knows that Kiyoshi Kurosawa is one of that nation’s most important working filmmakers. His ability to manipulate worn-out generic forms into provocative and profound packages is turning heads around the world. Recently he has been confidently experimenting with narrative structure, especially in films like Charisma and Barren Illusion, which demonstrate his commitment to keeping cinema fresh and exciting.

His newest film, developed for television, is a psychological thriller. Sort of. The story involves a woman whose husband is a sound effects technician. She quietly works out of their home as a kind of spiritual advisor, mostly assisting people in need. One day a girl is kidnapped in strange circumstances. The detective on the case, unable to find any clues, hires the spiritualist to assist him. The girl escapes and, coincidentally, hides in the husband’s equipment case. The woman uses her powers to locate the girl and they bring her into the house to recover. Deciding that now is the time for her to become a star of the spiritualist community, she prods her bumbling husband into creating an elaborate hoax to have the girl miraculously “found.”

One of Kurosawa’s trademarks is to create critical paradoxes and Seance is no exception. By investing deep hubris in a spiritually enlightened character, he elegantly questions the generic authority of the medium—Why do we always believe that someone communicating with the other world is either a complete charlatan or telling the absolute truth? More playfully, he marries the husband’s Foley designs with the sounds of spiritual disturbance, a clever special effects trick that artfully implicates the viewer in the “hoax” of the spiritual and generic medium. But the glory of Kurosawa is that these speculations are beside the point. Ultimately, Seance is a rip-snorting thriller full of fascinating twists and action that delivers exactly what it promises.
—Noah Cowan