Day Twenty-One: Infection (2004)
Infection opens with several vignettes that gradually reveal to us the various nurses, doctors, and patients that populate a barren hospital one night. The stafff is overworked, underfunded and in danger of mental collapse. The patients, those that aren’t rotting away from burns or a very mysterious disease, are probably clinically insane, or don’t exist to begin with. The entire thing is absurd, particularly the design of the hospital from Hell, but then so are most nightmares, and for awhile director Masayuki Ochiai plays phenomenally on all the little things that nag you while you sit in a hospital waiting room. What if they re-used diseased syringes? What if something really deadly is incubating in the person who sits next to you? What if the doctor is crazy?
Infection appears to be one of those “people get picked off one by one by a mysterious thing that may or may not mutate them” kind of movies. I was thinking John Carpenter’s The Thing or Leviathan. Ochiai does incorporate some of those conventions, but there is also an emphasis placed, particularly in the third act, on something less tangible. Reality begins to crumble for these characters, and we wonder whether the disease is of the tell-tale variety, some sort of mass guilt that plagues the staff over a cover up that happens earlier in the film. The doctors turn on each other, try to figure out the source of the disease and…
…that’s right around when the film totally shoves its head up its own ass. Imagine the end of The Sixth Sense, only instead of Bruce Willis being the ghost, it turns out that yes, he’s the ghost, then, no, he’s not a ghost, then, well, yes, he may be a ghost, but then, no Haley Joel Osment is the ghost and he’s imagining that Bruce Willis is a ghost to deal with his own fear of being a ghost. What I just wrote is much more coherent than the last twenty minutes or so of Infection, which turns into an inescapable house of mirrors for its characters. By the end, convolution has become the disease and, believe me, Ochiai isn’t offering a cure.
It works though, and I normally don’t go for the Japansese horror films that get shipped to the U.S and are, inevitably, remade as more sensical but even more boring American films for teens. Infection maintains interest even in its knottier sections because it’s grounded in a very true, tangible anxiety of a total loss of control, of a fear that people who should know what they’re doing don’t.
October 22nd, 2007 at 10:03 am
Sounds interesting if not entirely successful. I’m also slow to warm up to the Japanese brand of horror.
I like the emphasis on mood as much as action, but there’s something about them that doesn’t quite translate for me.
October 22nd, 2007 at 10:22 am
They generally don’t work for me either. I really liked “Ringu” too though and I thought Verbinski botched his version of it. The Ring looked good, and was competently performed and executed, but there was just a certain lifelessness to it, and a boring insistence on explaining every damn piece of imagery. i’m surprised a professor character didn’t step in somewhere to lecture the audience.
It isn’t a remake of a Japanese film, but the ending of Vanilla Sky was irritating in a similar way, it could have been re-titled “David Lynch For Dummies”.