This was one of a six-film series called Hideshi Hino's Theater of Horror. He creates horror manga and I'm familiar with a little of his work. I've read Hell Baby and watched the insanely gross Guinea Pig films, of which he directed the 2nd and 6th.

This particular film is directed by Koji Shiraishi, whom I love. The film doesn't work at all, but at least it's an interesting failure. It's a wildly stylised fusion of 1920s silent cinema and 1950s B-movie schlock. It's mostly in black-and-white, with intertitles like a silent film. It has lurid, melodramatic music that sounds like nothing from the last seventy years, beyond perhaps parodies. Then, finally, the cinematography slavishly follows the look and rhythm of what I presume is the original manga, which means it hardly pays any attention to the actors themselves, even though one of them's quite well known (Yoshiyuki Morishita). That was weird. The selling point of live-action adaptations is that real people can bring alive the emotional beats. Here, no. The film's treating its actors like puppets. At its most extreme (the freak show and its audience of nine silent men), the film feels like a direct portrayal of a nightmare.

I'm sure watching this film is just like reading the original manga. There are scenes that don't work in live-action, but you can tell they'd be fine on the page. Acting isn't expected to fight its way past the shooting style. The mother manages it. The circus owner, briefly. No one else. Our eponymous heroine doesn't, although that's not her fault and she's certainly not bad. She's just playing second fiddle to how the film's being framed and shot.

Mind you, a realistically played version of this story with emotional weight would have had people committing suicide in cinemas. It's a downer. To summarise the plot...

A schoolgirl called Yuri Ohara dies of a heart attack. The doctor signs her death certificate and explains that she's a corpse... even though she's sitting up in bed and listening to him. Yuri's family complain to her. She smells. It's not right for dead people not to die. They shun her, inject her with formaldehyde and ultimately resort to burning and stabbing (although for unexplained reasons they're starting to look zombie-like themselves). Why?!? I've no idea. Why didn't her family support her? She's still their daughter, isn't she? Why should it be important to kill her? It's possible to imagine all sorts of reasons, but the film has no interest in giving us any of them. Motivations are opaque and the reason for everything is "because it's in the manga".

Our dead heroine stumbles on, periodically shedding intestines and body parts. Surreal things happen. These are theoretically distressing and disturbing, but the shooting style puts too much distance between us and the film's events for that. The strongest applicable word is "unpleasant". There are certainly surprises, though. The film ends with Yuri having degenerated into a crawling, squeaking pile under a blanket... and ultimately she liquifies completely. There's nothing left of her but a puddle, which might possibly fertilise a yellow flower. The end.

In summary: that was bizarre. It's neither successful nor enjoyable, but it's a fascinating experiment. Despite making no attempt at a period setting (e.g. the pick-up truck), it's paying homage to multiple past eras of cinema. Even the opening credits are retro. And, of course, I'm sure it's a suicidally faithful adaptation of the manga.