Kokkuri (1997) is a bit deceptive.

First, consider its director, Takahashi Zeze, best known for his offbeat pink films Dream of Garuda and Tokyo Erotica X, though he has moved on to more commercial fare like Moon Child.

Second, look at how the film is marketed and the surface perception of its premise, one assumes it is another in a long line of supernatural Asian horror films. Apparently, in the UK for instance, the film was tagged as Dark Water 2 , despite the fact that Kokkuri came out a good number of year before Hideo Nakata's Dark Water.

Kokkuri is more of a teen drama, one of unrequited love and distinctly adolescent angst-ridden sexuality, with a healthy dollop of supernatural goings-on. You get the impression that Takahashi Zeze was commissioned to do a standard spook fare horror film and he instead decided to use the medium to explore some somber, slow paced teen troubles. It is one of those funhouse mirror films, on one side it is a pure supernatural horror flick, on the other it is a somber-faced, emotional teen drama.

The main characters are three friends, Tokyo schoolgirls Mio (Ayumi Yamatsu), Hiroko (Hiroko Mizuki), and Masami (Moe Ishikawa). The trio are a fairly typical group of teens, spending their time shopping, restless, talking about boys, and so forth. Hiroko is the most dour of the group. She spends a lot of time trying to fill an emotional void by making out with boys and secretly longs for Masami's boyfriend who she tries to steal. The three enjoy listening to a talk radio host named Michiru, a teen who discusses the intimate details of her life. Unbeknownst to the other two, Michiru is actually Moi, who fabricates or glamorizes most of her dalliances and angst.

After following the suggestion of Michiru, the girls make a kokkuri, or oiuji board, and ask it questions about the mystery radio presenter. The supernatural talk sessions reveals some disturbing details for each of the girls, that Michiru/Moi will be dead before her eighteenth birthday (only one month away), that Hiroko will fall in love, and that Masami and her boyfriend will break up.

Moi and Hiroko that find themselves literally haunted after their kokkuri experiment. They each struggle with childhood traumas that coincidentally involve death and water. For Moi, she saw her neglectful mother drown in the sea, in part because she was trying to save Moi, who wouldn't have been alone in the water if her mother wasn't busy making out on the beach with her lover. Hiroku, on the other hand, when she was younger watched as her friend drowned in a bathtub. Each has feelings of guilt, that they should have been the ones drowned, this coupled by their suppressed feelings for each other makes for some strange melding of haunted frights and teenage repression.

While I was watching Kokkuri I really enjoyed it, mainly because it was playing beyond my expectations, keeping the horror elements very subtle and standard, while the drama aimed for a kind of banal realism. Until the third act of the film, the supernatural elements are secondary, so Kokkuri comes across as more along the lines of Moonlight Whsipers rather than The Ring. Rather than pure scares or ghostly suspense, the film is carried by a different mood, one of pure ennui. As the final credits rolled, I realized its not entirely successful. On one hand, the horror is not really suspenseful. It gives decent atmosphere and a little too little too late tension in the finale. The drama is a bit of a muddle too, initially confusing flashbacks, and the character of Hiroko is such an emotional void she's about one step away from being a coma patient.

Having come out just before the big supernatural-horror wave that swept Asia, Kokkori thankfully doesn't play to many of the cliches that the genre has hammered to death. While we do get some glimpses of possession and a little ghost girl, Takahashi Zeze uses his child apparition as a chance to pay homage to Nicholas Roeg's Don't Look Know.

The DVD: Urban Vision.

Picture: Non-Anamorphic Widescreen. I'll go out on a limb and assume this film didn't get much play in theaters and was mainly intended as a direct to video film. Overall, it isn't a very pretty picture. The films excellent mood lighting is hampered by the low contrast, muddy print. Those familiar with genre DVD releases like Tomie or Dead or Alive won't be surprised with the quality. It seems to be a fairly common problem when securing decent elements for these kind of films. High end systems beware.

Sound: Japanese 2.0 Stereo track with optional English subtitles. I really enjoyed the sound design. The score is very simple, usually no more than a note or two being plucked, hit, bowed, or strummed. There are very long moments of silence, minimal atmospherics, which really reflects the characters boredom and the films strains at realism.

Extras: Urban Vision release trailers.--- Image Gallery.--- ‟How To Play Kokkuri‟ guide.

Conclusion: Kokkori is a hard one to recommend. It is not a bad film, exactly, but as a genre mish-mash, its hard to say how other film fans might judge it. It is like that old Reces Peanut Butter Cup commercial, ‟You got chocolate in my peanut butter.- No, you got peanut butter in my chocolate.‟ only it is, ‟You got supernatural horror in my teen drama.‟ and so forth. Luckily my indecisiveness is aided by a middling DVD transfer, so I can air on the side of a rental if it sounds curious to those looking for a little corss genre, foreign, horror film.