It's a J-horror ghost movie you'll want to call "authentic", because it's based around the imagery you'll see in actual spirit photos. You know, the dubious-looking "could be anything" images that you'll see in photos associated with ghost sightings. Amorphous stains on the wall, ambiguous things that might be faces, blurry things that are probably just a double exposure... all that kind of easily ignored stuff. Furthermore, the characters discuss it. What would it mean to be a ghost? Would it mean eternity with your loved ones, or endless utter loneliness? What if the afterlife had a finite size? Could it fill up? If it did, would the dead have to return to us?

Some of the film's characters are even interested in ghosts. They're university students who read up on the subject and will urge you to contact them if you see anything.

It's all very Kiyoshi Kurosawa, i.e. elegaic and refined to the point of boredom, but with so much atmosphere and mood that it's extremely unsettling anyway. No one else makes films like him. You'd have to call this horror, but it's avoiding the usual obvious scare tactics. I have absolutely no interest in this film's 2006 American remake (co-written by Wes Craven) or its two 2008 straight-to-video sequels, which will be far more commercially minded.

The camera crawls along. Long shots of empty rooms, drained colours, increasingly deserted Tokyo cityscapes, camera asides that in any other film would mean an impending jump scare but here might just be Kurosawa being Kurosawa... it's tense and creepy, even if you don't know why. It's like a bad dream you can't wake up from. The characters drift towards madness or worse. The world's heading for apocalypse. The ugly soundtrack adds to the sense of dislocation and unease.

It's a techno-horror film. The dead can be seen in photos and on the internet. This is done superbly and hasn't dated at all, feeling just as creepy today and arguably even more relevant. This film feels modern, despite being intensely topical for its year of release. (It came out when hikikomori were becoming a social crisis in Japan, then shows a passenger plane crashing in a major city in a film released seven months before 9/11.) It's exploring ideas of depression and isolation, which is still today a very internet thing. There's a metaphor in a computer-generated world of dots who attract each other if they get too far away, but die if they get close. We have social media, message boards, etc. but it's ultimately just pixels on a screen, like those zombie dot-people. Being connected through technology doesn't always stop people from feeling alone.

Things stay "alive" online long after their originals are dead. Dead celebrities act in new movies today, thanks to CGI. There's a lot in this material and Kurosawa's right on top of it.

It's dark as hell. No one else would have made this odd, elliptical ending. If you let it get to you, you'll think it's the bleakest, most depressing horror film ever. If you're not in the mood, though, you might think it's drab, banal and overly distant. Personally, I think these Kurosawa horror films I've been reviewing might improve on a rewatch, making you less worried about the plot and more open to turning off and letting their atmosphere soak in. It's certainly different, anyway.

"I'm cold."