A teenager awakes in hospital; by the time we acknowledge this and what’s going on, she’s already hiding behind her mobile phone and headphones, which establishes a key motif in The Invisible Half (2024): the use of mobile phone technology to either facilitate, or block out, the outside world. We also see that the mobile phone isn’t exactly helpful to her: in a group chat, Elena (Lisa Siera) witnesses her classmates discussing her, the ‘gaijin’ (probably best translated as ‘foreigner’) who has just dropped out of school.
Japanese culture isn’t particularly accommodating to gaijin teenagers, so it seems. Upon recovery, Elena starts a new school but the teacher – even if well-meaning – introduces her to the rest of the students as ‘half Japanese’, entrenching that sense of stigma from the very start. Adults are…well, a bit useless in this film, if well-meaning. There is at least some support from a friendly classmate called Akari, and – as mercenary as it seems – the emphasis is pretty immediately taken away from her by the late arrival of another social outcast, nicknamed ‘Nyan’ by the others. Nyan hides behind a screen, too: accordingly, when one of the other girls hides her device, she reacts angrily, running from class. The others watch her outside, where she acts as if she is being pursued by someone, or something.
Little does Elena know – yet – that the girls planted Nyan’s phone in her bag. She finds it later that night, accidentally cutting her hand on its cracked screen. It’s too late, sadly, to avert the disaster which is unfolding for Nyan, even if Elena wanted to return her phone. And whatever was afflicting her begins to afflict Elena. Nyan had briefly suggested that her phone offered her ‘protection’ – but from what? Whatever it is, it’s linked to the mobile phone somehow, and (for reasons never fully explained) only Elena’s mobile phone can warn her when a mysterious presence gets close. Using whatever knowledge she can glean, Elena has to solve the mystery of the supernatural stalker, before she ends up like Nyan.
Director of The Invisible Half, Masaki Nishiyama, debuted with a fantastic short film called Smahorror in 2019 which made it as one of Warped Perspective’s favourite shorts of the year. This is his first feature-length offering, and it retains lots of similar tech horror elements. There are lots of similar strengths here too, though making the leap from just a few minutes to 100+ minutes has brought some issues, largely around pace and narrative. However, and skip straight to the next paragraph if you fear a mild spoiler: one of its key difficulties is in its clear similarities to a certain film called It Follows. We have a pursuing, malevolent being which can only be seen by its next victim; we have the loneliness of the ordeal; we have the sense that it passes from person to person according to some rule. Some of the scenes are arguably straight up lifted from the earlier, admittedly very influential movie. However, if you can get past that and enjoy the film on its terms, then there’s enough here to prove that it’s not just a do-over.
The main way The Invisible Half stands apart is through its clever use of the mobile phone, not just as an incidental part of the plot, but an integral one. Masaki Nishiyama is still only twenty-five years old; his relationship to this kind of technology is very different from a lot of older filmmakers, given that he has grown up entirely with mobile devices rather than coming to them later in life and then making sense of them. We see things like group chats unfolding in a plausible and meaningful way, and we see the use of phones as a convenient barrier between real life and virtual life; the audio used to indicate that characters are blocking things out with headphones is simply but effectively done. The alternative use of phones – as a kind of safety device – is another interesting idea. Being plugged in and online is imperative here, for one reason or another, and it’s done very organically.
There are other strengths, too. J-horror has always played a blinder when it comes to making light, airy, modern spaces very unsettling, and The Invisible Half is no different, with a lot of the horror unfolding at Elena’s light, airy, modern school. (It’s also charming that when two characters head off to explore a much darker, scarier place that they still take off their shoes to do it.) There is good variety in the camerawork, and the SFX – though it holds off to unleash its biggest, most impressive sequences, is nicely done by Cao Moji, who also worked on Godzilla Minus One. It’s also a rare pleasure to see an ingenious use of intertitles, used here as part of the story, communicating something integral and intriguing.
However, devoid of the simple but clear rationale behind It Follows, The Invisible Half’s central premise does run into a few snags. These are no doubt magnified by the runtime, as audiences are typically less forgiving of elements in a feature – a fairly long feature – that they might happily ignore in a short film. Questions arise concerning the creature’s behaviour, attacking indiscriminately in some cases, disappearing for long periods, with its conduct surprisingly well-understood by Elena from very early on, despite there being gaps around both her timeline and Nyan’s timeline. Given that there’s quite a long settling-in period for Elena’s character (which does include lots of rare, engaging discussion about the treatment of mixed heritage people in Japan), there was plenty of time to expound the premise of the film more. Similarly with Elena and Akari’s close friendship: this comes out of nowhere, maybe a chat or two, but then jumps straight to being integral to the plot. The script is underwritten in several places and runs aground in others, which has a cost to the film’s overall sense of pace.
So, there are some teething issues, and a few instances of the difficulties of scaling up, but on balance, there’s still stacks of evidence of promise and skill here. The fact that The Invisible Half took six years to make perhaps at least partly accounts for some of its more disjointed qualities, but Nishiyama’s raft of ideas for tech horror hold fast. As such – look out for his next feature, Influencer Ghost, appearing later this year via the legendary TOHO.
The Invisible Half (2024) screens at the Raindance Film Festival 2025 on June 20th.