Spring: (2014. dir: Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead) Kind of a pretty love story set in the shadow of Vesuvius, and probably the less you know going in, the better. But yes, there is a monster, and yes, a couple of bloody deaths.
*SPOILER ALERT*: Remember the original Stargate? Before all the TV spinoffs, the old Roland Emmerich movie with Spader and Kurt Russell? Remember when they encounter Ra, the supreme being, the entity as old as time, and you think to yourself, "That's it? Old as the aeons, and all you are is a mincing fashion-plate?" This is not quite that bad, but the millennia-old critter is still nowhere near as wonderful as Jarmusch's nosferatu in Only Lovers Left Alive. Maybe just watch that instead. Or at least make sure you watch that one as well. It's so seldom that Jarmusch does something marvellous, it's only fair to celebrate it when he does.
Kaidan: (2007. dir: Hideo Nakata) A gorgeous ghost story set in feudal Japan. At its center, geographically, lies a haunted pool; teleologically, the center is a House-of-Atreus curse on two families, uniting them karmically. The inciting event is given in diegetic prologue: a money-lender demands repayment of his debt from a samurai, who kills him and dumps his body in the (already haunted) pool. Both men are sinners; one is a usurer, the other a murderer. The tendrils of bloody consequence will wind through three generations and sidelong to affect cousins as well. In the end, there is a sense, with its strikingly eerie last image, that the curse may be played out, but perhaps only because the last survivor, the watching sister, has no children.
Movies in Japanese, more than other languages, frustrate because I often suspect the subtitles are not telling the whole story, that I'm missing out on the subtleties, and this is no exception. Some of the phraseology is modern, as well ("suck it up", "ask you out"), jarring one into a place of uncomfortable anachronism.
Still, the photography, the strangeness of the story, the sense of doom, the beauty of the palette, all together weave a concerted spell.
Thale: (2012. dir: Aleksander L. Nordaas) A lovable duo of crime-scene cleaners stumbles upon Huldra, a being from Norwegian mythology, stuck in a mouldering basement. The acting is lovely, the script communicates itself well even across the language barrier, and the creature herself is a beguiling mix of innocence and monstrosity. The story maintains a wistful melancholy travelling through a convincingly otherworldly atmosphere.
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