★★★★☆
Dave Boyle draws on J-horror’s haunted history, then pulls the rug away with a ghost story his heroine has to solve to survive.
Ghosts? Airi (Moeka Hoshi, of Shōgun) has seen it all before. The working medium at the heart of Never After Dark rolls up to a remote property in rural Japan to deal with a routine haunting: doors that won’t stay shut, noises in the night, and a spirit shuffling the corridors with his jaw torn wide open. Just another day on the job.
With the mother-and-son owners packed off, Boyle (making his horror debut after Netflix’s House of Ninjas) lets Airi get to work, and she treats the place like a crime scene. She clocks patterns, pockets clues and keeps a tally. Think CSI: Ghostbusters Japan. Her sister warns her this job is nastier than it looks, and the sister should know: she’s dead too, and lives in the mirrors. Airi ignores her. Big mistake.
This is an old-school haunted house mystery: spot the clues and join the dots before time runs out. The middle stretch takes its sweet time, circling and nudging forward, and anyone craving non-stop escalation may get fidgety. Stick with it. Watching Airi deduce her way through the house is half the fun, especially since she isn’t quite as good at this as she thinks.
Hoshi is a riot of unflappable cool. A phone rings and a Ju-on-style throat croak gurgles down the line? She listens politely, then announces she’s hanging up if that’s all it’s got. A box of human teeth stashed in the wall? Shrug. That steadiness is what makes it so unnerving when things start to slip. And slip they do, slowly and then all at once, because ghosts are not the only thing to worry about here. When it all finally kicks off, my watch flashed a warning: 90dB, avoid prolonged exposure. Message received. Underneath the mayhem sits a tender story of two sisters, and it gives the carnage real sting.
Boyle stocks the film with images straight out of Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Takashi Shimizu, drops them into a classic haunted house procedural, and trusts the audience to keep up instead of spelling everything out. No wonder he’s been tapped to remake Pulse. Like Hokum, another great haunted hotel movie this year, Never After Dark gives you something to solve as well as a night to survive. That puts it a cut above the pack, and it explains why it walked away with the Grand Jury Prize at Overlook.
Never After Dark played at the Imagine Film Festival in Amsterdam, and is on general release in the US.