Airi (Moeka Hoshi) practices an unusual profession: she’s a spiritualist who frees homes from troubling spirits by ushering them gently into the next world. She’s been doing this for a while and works with a simple set of tools, including an ornate candle and a small mirror with a zoetrope around the edge. She also has one ironclad rule, which explains this film’s title: she only works during the day, because at night the spirits are too strong.
When we first meet Airi in Dave Boyle’s Never After Dark, she’s driving her beat-up car along a lonely Japanese country road to her next job, which is to free an elegant country inn from a spirit witnessed by the owner (Tae Kimura). While the owner is exuberant that Airi has arrived, her son (Kento Kaku) is more reserved and skeptical about the existence of the ghost. He’s also suspicious of Airi, warning her that the house has been inventoried and if she takes anything, he will know.
Something seems off from the start: the owner thought she was hiring a pair of sisters, and we see a younger woman in the car with Airi who converses with her in the kind of easy banter that suggests they know each other well. When Airi arrives at the inn, however, the second person is nowhere to be found, but later we see her again in the house. Soon you notice that she’s only seen as a reflection, which is less surprising when we learn she’s the ghost of Airi’s dead sister Miku (Kurumi Inagaki).
Many otherwise successful haunted house movies fail in the final leg: they have atmosphere and intrigue to burn but don’t know how to bring the story to a convincing conclusion. Boyle solves this problem by making Never After Dark two movies in one: a traditionally styled Japanese ghost story with a graphic horror action movie sandwiched within. While both parts are successful in their respective styles, the shift is jarring (individual shots of body horror are brief but also quite horrible) and the audience may feel as surprised as Airi, who thought she was dealing with a quiet Japanese spirit that just wants to resolve their emotional issues and go peacefully to the next world, when things get violent.
There are hints from the beginning that there is more going on in this film than a conventional ghost story. For one, the opening drive recalls the opening of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, as does the anomalous soundtrack by Jonathan Snipes, and we know how that one turned out. Another clue: one of the first objects we see on screen is a bloody axe. Third and most significant: when exploring an immaculately kept inn, it can never be a good sign to find a tin of bloody teeth tucked away in a drawer. Before long you may be thinking that Airi should have paid more attention to Miku’s warnings that there’s more trouble in this house than she expects.
All the technical elements of Never After Dark are strong, with the low-light cinematography of Patrick Ouziel and the production design of Yuji Hayashida being particular standouts. This is one beautiful film, and the props Miko uses to conduct the exorcism are both understated and memorable (if no one is selling an exorcism mirror and candle set on etsy, an opportunity is being missed). The setting is a blend of traditional Japanese architecture and Western Dark Academia furniture, while the costumes by Arata Kobayashi are simple but let us know who each character is. The actors are all strong and have substantial experience in Japan, although only Moeka Hoshi (Usami Fuji in the Hulu production of Shogun) is likely to be familiar to Western audiences. | Sarah Boslaugh
