Shin'ya Tsukamoto stars as a camera man who witnesses a man's suicide in the subway tunnels and becomes driven to find out what drove him to it. He finds tunnels under the subway station that lead to an ancient city, where he finds a young naked woman chained to a wall. He takes her home with him, but cannot get her to speak or eat. He discovers that her only diet is blood, and soon he's killing women and bringing their blood home for her. Nothing at all is what it seems to be in this film. It was shot in 8 days on digital video between Shimizu's direction of "Ju-On: The Grudge" and it's American remake. I like it ... everything has a sense of terrible foreboding.

This movie started off really well, with lots of adventure and the cinematography is great. This movie was done 8 days before Ju-On and I would say that the director did a decent job. There was suspense in the beginning. After the cameraman brought the girl home, he starts to find out more about her and starts to buy new clothes. He found out that the girl feeds on blood and does whatever it takes to obtain blood from her. The first 2/3 of the movie started off well, but the last 1/3 of this movie was not that good. I could not understand what was happening during the last 1/3 of the movie at all. Lots of questions just come to my mind at the end of this movie. Why was the cameraman insane? Why did he kill all his family members? I could not really get what happened in the end? Why was he terrified and why was his face red? In addition, around the last 1/3 of this movie I started to feel like I am watching a movie about someone doing whatever it takes to find food for his pet (only exception is that the girl eats blood) and starts to get quite uninteresting. However, the good points of the film is that the imagery at the beginning of this movie and the mystery of this movie was done very well. The place where the cameraman found the girl and try to find out more facts about that girl by checking her teeth buying clothes for her to wear. There is quite a lot of emotion between the characters in this film. This film is really beautiful at the beginning and the middle but gets very complicating and slightly uninteresting towards the end. Still recommended if you want to watch a film that is original though. Score: 7.7/10

This movie seemed to derive itself from the works of Abe Kobo, a Japanese existentialist novelist who created vast unseen worlds. The underworld presented in this book was much like those of Abe. The main character has no charisma and evokes no sympathy; however, as a viewer, I couldn't wait to see the next thing that would happen to him. He is a man obsessed by video, video-taping his whole day, then reviewing the tapes until late into the evening.A suicide, which he films, starts him on his journey into the underworld. He comes back with a mute vampire, who he is compelled to feed, eventually through a couple of matter-of-fact and video-documented murders. The movie is low-budget: The underworld is spiral stairways and municipal tunnels opening to what looks like a mountain-scape. None of these venues look like sets, but have a more mundane feel. The acting and directing is solid. I was disappointed by the ending which, I must confess, I didn't "get"...

'Marebito' is certainly better than your average US slasher flick, but don't expect much more than that.At the start, with the emphasis on voyeurism, recorded death and vicarious experience, it teeters on becoming something impressive and somehow relevant to the omniscience, nihilism and anonymity of the digital age.But the 'horror' aspects of this film completely ruin it. What begins so intriguingly becomes suddenly farcical, more akin to a sub-par episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Both the 'discovery' of a fantasy underworld, and then the clumsy Frankenstein narrative, are irredeemably hackneyed story lines that the director attempts to conceal behind portentous dialogue, edgy security-camera footage and a naked young woman.Like a lot of style-over-substance J-Horror films, the plot eventually comes to rely upon inexplicable twists and mysterious appearances that may excite some people's interest but in reality are the signs of bad writing and a half-baked story that can be modified with ease because nothing significant is taking place anyway.As for the 'hollow world' philosophy - it begs belief how pretentiously the film takes this, as if it has hit upon an entirely new idea. 'Underworlds', however, are a staple of horror movies; backing this one up with the obscure work of an early 20th century sci-fi writer doesn't make it any more exciting or screen-worthy.Overall 'Marebito' is disappointingly poor. Beautifully shot, atmospheric in places and all that, but artistically inert after the first twenty minutes and no more enjoyable than countless films that cover similar ground with much more panache and cinematic touch. It is the work of a complacent director and the product of a genre that all too easily loses itself in its own idiom.