Sweet Home (aka Sûîto Homu)
1989
Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Kiyoshi Kurosawa
A television crew ventures to the remote mansion of a famous
artist by the name of Mamiya. Inside they find the place is a dusty wreck, but
there is a beautiful fresco of the artist’s wife. An art restoration
specialist, Asuka (Fukumi Kuroda), becomes possessed by a vengeful spirit and
digs up a small casket after another crew member, Taguchi (Ichiro Furutachi)
kicks over a grave marker. Soon the shadows of the house erupt into life and the
crew must rescue their missing members before they are consumed. Their only
ally is a weird old man who works at a nearby service station and seems to know
quite a bit about the supernatural. Something truly terrible waits for them
all deep inside the house.
The first half of Sweet Home is a slow burn; there are some impressively
ominous woods and the decayed interior of the mansion work well to lay
ground work for the tension. At about the 45 minute mark the film explodes into
something much more aggressive and strange. Taking a few notes from Poltergeist
(1982) and Evil Dead II (1987), Sweet Home throws some great practical effects
work on the screen, but is also smart enough to keep everything that is
happening grounded with an emotional undercurrent. It occasionally threatens
to grow a little saccharine, but never to the point where it intrudes on the
horror. Sweet Home measures out its scares almost perfectly, knowing just how and when to escalate the terror.
No comments:
Post a Comment