A man awakens in a dark and tight space with just enough room to fit into. Everywhere he looks there is only the cold damp concrete walls surrounding him. When the initial shock settles he starts his struggle to find a way out and answers to the questions, what am I doing here? Who is doing this to me? And what is going on?

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ConstructingHorror.com

With an opening sequence that definitely will draw you in, Shinya Tsukamoto makes a great return to the more psychical exploration of human endurance after several films delving into the human psyche, breaking free oneself and inner closure, A Snake of June and Vital to mention a few. Returning to themes of urban decay, the man made city and the human relationship to it is a great move as Haze is a truly disturbing movie that leaves an imprint and has you gasping for air on more than one occasion.

Upon the first watch HAZE just blew my mind! At first I thought that it might be a bit on the short side to manage to pack any decent punch, but after just a few minutes it became quite obvious that this was going to be one of the most distressing and unsettling movies that I’d seen in a long time. Everything that you may have liked about movies like Eli Roth’s Hostel, Vincenzo Natali’s Cube and to some extent the Saw series, is taken to the limit here. The torture element is very high and the claustrophobia released endorphin levels definitely peeks with this movie.

Let’s return to that opening sequence. We first see an extreme close up on an eye. A quick edit later and we see a worried, confused face. Back to the close up on the eye as the man frantically searches for some visual reference of his whereabouts, and then a half shot as he stares at the camera with a blank face. Cut to his point of view; a long, dark, narrow corridor. He starts to fumble his way forward as a series of facial expressions show is that he is starting to panic. Suddenly his face turns to fear, we see his feet being drawn backwards over the progress made before he smashes into the wall behind him and blood starts to pour down over his eyes. He looks up again and we realize from a second P.O.V. that the passage has just enough room for a person to walk through. He feels his legs and realizes that he only dressed in his underwear, and as this sinks in he starts to feel the pain of a bloody injury to his abdomen. He screams and the screen goes black. This opening sequence definitely sends a harrowing, gut wrenching sense of claustrophobia though your body. This is where most viewers with a phobia for dark tight spaces will turn off their DVD.

The man, played by Tsukuamoto himself starts shuffling his way through the tight corridors, facing one distressing trial after another; he’s forced to crawl through spaces so tight that he barely can raise his head off the floor. He hears haunting mechanic noises that he has no way of localizing. He falls down holes and comes within inches of having his head skewered on sharp rusty spikes, and in possibly one of the most disturbing scenes of this movie, he forces himself to walk down a corridor so tight that he has to open his mouth and slot the pipe running along the side of the wall into his mouth. Talk about a teeth grinding sequence. Huge hammers spring out of holes in the walls, holes strategically places to lure him to gaze through them. On his ordeal through the crawlspaces he comes to a room filled with mutilated, severed human remains. Past all the gory body parts he sees a woman. [Kaori Fujii, who also played a leading role in Tsukamoto’s Tokyo Fist in 1999]. She too is trapped in the strange, moist concrete maze, and is also asking the same questions as he is; why am I here, and how do I get out of here? Together they slither their way though watery death traps filled with bloody parts of maimed corpses, squeeze though tight submerged passages to what they think might be an exit out of the terrifying maze…

Initially made as a short for the Korean Jeonju Film Festival focusing on short movies from Japan, China and Korea shot on Digital media, Tsukamoto expanded the narrative to create this provoking forty nine minute short feature instead. Shot on a thirteen day schedule, with a minimal crew, Tsukamoto even helped to build, paint and decorate the sets, and as he frequently does, plays the lead character himself. Tsukamoto is no stranger to low budget productions with a great original narrative, which he produces through his company Kaiyu Theatre. His films The Adventures of Electric Rod Boy, his breakthrough feature Tetsuo the Iron Man, and Hiruko the Goblin, brought him recognition and built his fan base. As the scale of the company’s projects got larger and larger, Tsukamoto burrowed deeper and deeper into the darker sides of the human mind. There’s no denying that Tsukamoto is a very visual and innovative storyteller, his films often tend to walk a fine line between surreal visuals, nightmarish visions and stunning beauty, where empathetic protagonists and fascinating antagonists taunt each other in such a poetic way that the audience sometimes finds themselves switching their values and become confused of who they should be cheering on.

Storytelling Highlights:

• Photography as part of the narrative.
As the majority of this movie takes place in confided spaces and builds heavily on basic fears like claustrophobia, Tsukamoto makes sure that the camera registers the location in this way too. There are almost NO wide shots or establishing shots throughout the movie which only adds to the claustrophobic feeling. Almost every shot is a close up or an extreme close up of the characters and the surrounding milieu. Not until the revelation at the end of the movie does Tsukamoto pull back the camera and utilize the fuller image.

• Utilizing the most basic fears.
Using primal fears like claustrophobia and disorientation is a great way to affect your audience. The fears that HAZE plays off are the most basic fears of the human mind. Take away our possibility to familiarize and locate ourselves and we automatically become distressed and worried. What is outside our field of sight? Where am I? Can I find a way out of here? All those genetically programmed feelings, fear of restriction and suffocation, fear of not knowing where we are, create an uncanny feeling within the viewer as the camera never pulls back to give us a reference frame to cling onto.

• Rush of Insight.
As the movie comes to it climax, you come to the insight that these two people are dead. Tsukamoto never explains in what way they died, he only shows us glimpses as he brings the film to a climax. We understand that they in some way have inflicted lethal harm to each other and that their journey through the maze is their transportation through purgatory. The final images of Tsukamoto on the balcony as an old man are in fact his vision of the future they could have had if the events that lead up to the aftermath they finally find had not have happened. The metaphor is simple, with his female acquaintance by his side he has a chance to make it, without her he is nothing, and stands no chance of a future. In some way you could say that Tsukamoto’s HAZE is a DV-cam version of Nobuo Nakagawa’s Jigoku, or Adrian Lynne’s Jacob’s Ladder, where the entire movie is reveals it’s self to be the last mental images played up in the dying protagonist’s mind, with glimpses of past, present and future images wrapped into one non-linear narrative.

• Creating an complex inner beast.
It’s interesting that whey you look at HAZE you initially find “no” visual antagonist to point out, we never get an explanation to why or what the labyrinth that the man and woman find themselves in. There’s a threat, but no visual reference. He’s the protagonist trying to find his way out of the maze. I would say that there still is an antagonist. The man is both the antagonist, and the protagonist. As mentioned above the man is in fact dead or dying as he goes through the maze, a maze he creates in his own mind, hence making him his own protagonist.

• Low budget advantages.
One of the finest highlights of this movie is the fact that Tsukamoto and crew managed to make such an impressive movie on such a narrow, restrained budget. Most of the movie is shot in one location, an apartment that they rented and build the different sets in. By opting to shoot the majority of the film with close ups the set’s could be smaller and more constrained. In the editing several different angles are creatively used to give the impression of much larger shots. Like when he is drawn backwards through one of the tight corridors finally hitting the wall behind him. A few foot of set goes along way if you use it right. Shooting on DV cameras with a possibility to instantly check the takes and thereafter edit them on set as the shooting continues allowed Tsukamoto to pull off the tight production schedule of two weeks.