New Religion

Moth Understanding

New Religion
Japan 2022
Directed by Keishi Kondo

Warning: Full on spoilers... some open to interpretation.

New Religion is one I missed at last year’s FrightFest (I think it was on a late night slot or something else which forced me to take a swerve on it). It’s a shame because I think it would definitely have been my favourite film of the festival for that August. Catching up to it now, I can see it’s a very confident and assured feature debut from director Kondo. You don’t expect to see  a fully formed, perfect piece of art on a directors first go but, that’s exactly what we have here.

The film starts off with a dream sequence all done, like many scenes in the film, in images bathed in a red light. We have flowers giving way to city scapes, a moth, dolls, transformations... a surrealistic nightmare before we even get near the basic set up of the movie (although, it turns out this is also a relevant puzzle piece because dreams seem to play a large part in this particular artistic construct). We then join lead protagonist Miyabi, played by Kaho Seto, in the one set up of her room and balcony which dominated a lot of the shots which take place in that particular environment in the film. She reads Virginia Wolfe’s To The Lighthouse while her daughter waters the plants. Everything is a perfectly controlled composition, as Kondo uses verticals and horizontals in the room to delineate areas and put each of the two actresses in their own specific, visual partition... to the point where the shot almost looks like a checkerboard. It’s a level of control and meticulous framing which permeates the entire film, even in the more airy exteriors. 

And then the daughter falls to her death from the balcony.

We then cut to some time later. Miyabi’s husband has divorced her but she’s still living in the same apartment with her new boyfriend. And she’s working as a call girl to pay her bills. Due to the death of her daughter, the relationship she has with her new boyfriend, entirely due to Miyabi’s attitude, is muffled and minimalistic.

Then, one of her colleagues at work starts talking about going out with her father... even though he’s been dead for some time. Miyabi shrugs it off when she notices the other girl has been cutting herself but, some time later when she and her boss (who drives her to her tricks and waits for her, to take her back after) see the girl on the street... she starts stabbing random people and in one case gnawing on someone’s intestines before running off. Much later on, the same girl is held accountable (but still uncaptured) for the bombings of several buildings around Japan, all happening almost simultaneously.

By this time Miyabi has her own problems. She takes over the girl’s client, a sinister man called Oka (played by Satoshi Oka) who lives in a darkly lit apartment. He talks through speakers in the walls because, well... his explanation is that he has throat cancer but he doesn’t always have the machine on this throat. But he doesn’t want sex... instead, he asks to take photos of specific body parts of Miyabi... in the first session it’s a shot of her spine and another of her legs. He has her sign the photos after, saying it’s not necessary that she uses her real name and on subsequent visits he takes more photos of different body parts. Very soon after the first session, Miyabi starts having dreams of her dead daughter and also sensing her in her apartment through whatever parts of her body have been photographed. Things escalate and the dreams get more vivid. When her ears are photographed, she can hear her daughter talking to her in the apartment. When her eyes are photographed, she can see her too and starts properly interacting with her, much to the dismay of her boyfriend who thinks she’s going nuts. Which may well be the case of course.

When Miyabi’s pimp breaks into Oka’s apartment to check things out... one of Oka’s many other photographic subjects, a man, seems to be birthed out of one of his developing rooms and kills the guy. Meanwhile, in her dreams possibly, Miyabi is asked to consider if a human dreaming of watching a moth is reality or whether the human is just in the dream of the moth... or some such. This is not a film I claim to understand and, honestly, I’m not sure I’m supposed to. But, at the end of the movie, which I think is very much open to interpretation, Miyabi, or a rebirthed Miyabi who has possibly replaced her, has become weaponised in much the same way as her earlier call girl colleague. Possibly she has been targeted by Oka because of her all encompassing grief. As the film closes, Oka starts to turn his gaze towards Miyabi’s ex-husband.

I think.

It’s hard to tell and one of the things this director does, using bright juxtapositions of coloured lighting such as purples and reds, is he manages to perfectly capture a kind of sleep dream state and waking dream state which the audience is drawn into, slowly merging the two until the observer is unsure which is which and how they impinge on reality. There’s sinister crackling on a lot of the soundtrack, as if a piece of music were too loud for a speaker to be able to handle (but not necessarily while any underscore is playing). Indeed, in some sequences where things get out of kilter and a wonderfully sinister feeling is produced through the music, I found myself thinking back to David Lynch’s Eraserhead or Twin Peaks and, I suspect Lynch could be said to be an influence on this director in some ways. Especially since there are some sequences in the underground room where the call girls wait to be called up by their bosses, where there is a constant flickering light which, inevitably towards the end of movie, goes out completely and plunges everything into darkness... which is very much an early trope of Lynchian cinema, of course.

Another sequence, from one dream in particular, where Miyami is pointing to something to show herself, who has entered the dream... very much reminded me of a certain moment in the viral video from the Ringu series of films so, I’m wondering if this was a deliberate shout out or just a coincidence. Either way, it’s all good stuff and helps permeate the general atmosphere of creepiness that the movie conjures up.

So there you have it. New Religion (and I’ve no idea why it’s got that title, to be honest) feels very much like one of those late 1990s J-horror films that Tartan (remember them) were so good at releasing and then distributing on DVD in the UK at the time... but with a healthy dose of David Lynch thrown in for good measure, it seems to me. And I’ve certainly missed this kind of filmmaking of late. If that sounds like your cup of tea then... yeah, you’re probably right. What this film needs now is a proper Blu Ray release in this country because, wow, the film is exquisite and deserves the kind of physical release that can do it justice. Definitely a director to watch out for, I think.