
There are a couple of things to say ahead of this review of Rampo Noir. The first is that, assuming you have read some Edogawa Ranpo and always longed to see more of his work brought to the screen, that you should be careful what you wish for: this anthology film’s scattergun selection of tales, styles and directors makes it in many respects a hard sell. The second thing to say is that, if you haven’t read any Edogawa Ranpo but fancy some lesser-seen J-horror from the same decade which brought us the likes of Ju-On (2002), then absolutely forget it. Whilst there are some elements of horror, and in places some quite abhorrent horror, these often drift out of left-field, in a film which does encompass many different styles, but still comes across as much more arthouse than horror. Rampo Noir will pop a bit of limb amputation on the screen – or at least heavily signpost it – and then idle away into pretty shots of the landscape, or some surreal, kaleidoscopic moments, apropos of very little. In essence, Rampo Noir is not for everyone, and I’m pretty sure it’s not for me, either, as much as it has interesting material dotted throughout its two hours+ runtime.
Two hours of artistically rotting corpses, pretty male psychopaths and auditory overload feels like a lot in any case, so perhaps it’s no bad thing that the first segment – Mars’s Canal – is silent. It features a naked man staggering through a barely-Earthlike landscape as he seems to reflect on the horrors of his past conduct – assuming he has some regret for the bout of sex-or-maybe-violence we see interspersed with his later wanderings. What’s it all about? No idea, but it at least operates as an hors d’oeuvre for what is to follow.
The next segment is the longest, and probably the most linear: Mirror Hell starts out at a tea ceremony lesson in a very traditional, even reactionarily so, small town in rural Japan. We are soon shown that for all the decorum integral to the ceremony itself, there’s some bad blood between some of these women. When the instructress falls dead after a surreal and head-frying experience with a small hand mirror, we learn that there’s a common denominator here: the mirror maker, Toru Itsuki (Hiroki Narimiya), whose work with the traditional skills of mirror-making have exposed him to the traditional mythology of the mirror – something which has taken over his psyche. There’s an engaging push-pull between supernaturalism and practical science here, as the investigating detective Mr Akechi accounts for the dangerous nature of the (very beautiful) mirrors by rational means. As we ponder which account is the right one, there’s plenty of visuals to enjoy. This is quite a long film, given that it’s one of four, but it seems justified in taking its time over its themes, idling over aspects of traditional Japanese practices and arts – translations of ancient texts, crafts, tea ceremonies. Rampo Noir is a bit of a misleading title overall: an alternative title is Rampo Jigoku – where ‘Jigoku’ approximately translates as ‘Hell’. However, Mirror Hell does have some identifiable noir-ish qualities, even if by coincidence. The shadows, the framing, the mysterious deaths, the hard-bitten private eye…I doubt you’d get Toru’s, erm, unusual sexual proclivities in a Hays Code noir, but it’s another reminder of where and when we actually are. This is the most successful segment by far.
The next one, Caterpillar, is based on one of Ranpo’s most unseemly short stories. Indeed, ‘The Caterpillar’ was banned by the Japanese authorities during the Sino-Japanese War in 1937 for its potentially harmful impact on morale. I’ll give them that: perhaps the time wasn’t right for the Japanese reading public to encounter a once-renowned Army veteran, a so-called and celebrated ‘war god’, bereft of his limbs and trapped in his body, little more than a ‘human caterpillar’. But the story itself is a mood piece – a dark, dark mood piece – and unlikely to be an easy story to film, although it has been done, and successfully, since Rampo Noir was made. Here, the film sticks fairly closely to the story, and is no less gruelling – a kind of Lady Chatterley’s Lover recast as a Guinea Pig film, with added arthouse stylistics. But who is watching the wife as she goads and torments her husband? Adding some of its own ideas and proclivities, Caterpillar is partly sickening and partly alienating. Its sickly sexuality is horrible to watch and its slow pace makes it all feel horribly unnecessary – in the sense that this is torture, made worse by almost rolling to a halt or pausing to overlay avant-garde flummery.
Finally, Crawling Bugs returns us to some more obviously noir-ish elements as a young actress, keen on the odd romantic tryst, becomes the object of obsession of her ostensibly ‘nice guy’ chauffeur – a man tormented by a terror of bugs, afraid to touch anyone. So he decides to kidnap her, and there’s no brilliant way out of a scenario like this for a pretty woman, so you can perhaps guess the rest. Yet, this feels lighter in tone that what has just unfolded; perhaps this is partly because there are moments of deliberate humour here, and things skip along at more of a pace. It feels absurd to feel grateful for an equally repellent story – which Crawling Bugs definitely is, in its own way – but that’s how it goes, this happens at not far off two hours in, and everything’s relative. I mean, it’d be nice if fewer women ended up with melted brains, burns, welts, limbs being chopped off or indeed a playground for maggots, but here we are. We do get a final girl, but only in the sense that she’s the final girl who’s going to have a protracted ordeal set to piano music.
Having been through all of the segments, it feels to this reviewer that there are just too many structural and tonal misfires here for things to work effectively. Nonetheless, arthouse cinema fans willing to be pushed into more unseemly terrain than usual may find enough here to love. Rampo Noir has some moments of artistic brilliance, with beautiful shots, inspired framing and striking visual flair. It certainly explores Ranpo’s fiction in radical ways, and that in itself may be enough to get it over the line for many viewers, keen to see something done with the source material which stretches beyond straightforward horror. Personally, some more sense of an overarching scheme, style and aim would have improved the overall experience, as the films feel mismatched, or else united only by sexual elements which are jarring and unpleasant, together with themes which feel simultaneously repetitive and overwhelming, especially after such a long runtime. Coming back to the original proviso: it is not for everyone, and for me will probably be hereafter filed as an interesting but defective cinematic experiment, one which has perhaps remained lesser-known for the twenty years for some of the reasons given above. If you want to make your own minds up, then the film is available now on Arrow.