I love this as a standalone film, but it's a remake, and it's in that function that I find in it a near-apotheosis for Kurosawa's perception, his personal idiosynchracy. In the Bryan Forbes film it's human machination that sets the kidnapping plot in motion, cunning and deception, in Kurosawa's remake it's happenstance, random cruelty.One scene particularly stands out for me in that regard, when the couple discover the young girl inexplicably lyind dead on the floor.Kurosawa highlights this set up with classical devices of theater, rain and lightning, the acceptable and expected portents of doom, but most importantly, with a cinema of utter, eerie, silence. It's not only that the girl's death is presented like an act of divine retribution, but also that it's quietly accepted as such. The lack of palpable explanation is not mentioned by the characters because, ostensibly, they understand the presence of the figurative devil exacting his dues, as do we.This of course is foreshadowed earlier in the film. Unlike the original Seance, the couple in the Kurosawa version simply discover the little girl in their house. The folly of keeping with them the girl for own reasons is not a mere scheme for glory but a yearning for a life that matters, for a small moment of feeling useful.The contrast is quietly heartwrenching, a tragedy, between a cold futile universe and the ordinary couple trying to make sense in it. The Shinto priest the husband calls on to perform an exorcism tells him that hell exists if you believe in it, it doesn't if you don't. For them, hell exists because they're open to the possibility.Is the ghostly presence in the film a hijink then, a kind of superfluous spectacle to make palatable the more important things? Yes and no. Ghosts in Shinto folk wisdom are a transmutation of guilt, of bad kharma, but also an aesthetic object of terror. This was never more apparent than with the advent of cinema. Seance gives the ghostly kid character, her haunting makes a difference because it's the haunting of a child. When she menacingly approaches the husband, we expect a certain kind of violence. Instead she merely pounces on him with the impotent anger of a child.Kurosawa sees himself as nothing more than a genre director. In films like Retribution, I see a director merely trying to break apart convention, for the pleasure or routine of it. Seance is a rare gem in this regard, it ventures for a look beyond the pale, the anguish and damnation of its horror echo through time. The parable matters because it talks of existence.Still, the man gives us a brilliant genre touch: the medium who can see the dead and be haunted by them but can't speak to them. The existential reading of this can be valuable if we arrive to it by our own admission.

This is a movie that famed director Kiyoshi Kurosawa made by demand for a TV company, after the success of Ringu. Well, there's a kind of Sadako feeling to it, the girls looks a lot like the one in Hideo Nakata's Dark water... but this is a flawed movie. Terrible script. Not scary at all (and I scare so easy! that's why I love terror movies). Forgettable.For instance (spoiler coming) at the very beginning of it, the psychological expert tells us about how, when a person sees her or his doppelganger, double, it's an omen of death. And then, one of the main characters actually goes through this experience... and doesn't die! Why sow a seed if you ain't going to follow it to the very consequences? I really don't get what's all the fuss about this guy... I love Japanese movies, I study Japanese, so if I find a Japanese movie too boring, I just listen... but I think this guy is overrated.

I cannot remember being scared by a movie like this. "The Sixth Sense" had very scary parts, but this was scary throughout. Writer/director Kiyoshi Kurosawa, who showed us what he could do when he transformed the thriller "Cure" into a chilling horror-like ending, now brings us pure horror with "Séance (Korei)". If you think the little girl in Poltergeist or the Exorcist are scary, you've never been haunted by a little girl before. Kurosawa makes this little darling so creepy that you might see her in the streets for the next few days (I'm slightly exaggerating here, but aren't movies always a bit exaggerated). Which is not exaggerated, however, is the skill Kurosawa has to entrance the viewer in a slow cumulating fear that creeps up from the bottom of your spine and spread through your shivering body. He uses hallways, shadows, rooms and corners like a magician and makes you feel right in the middle of the action, frightened, expecting and not knowing what to do.Visually mesmerizing (unintentional reference to what we learn in "Cure"), "Seance" still has a solid story which puts characters in an interesting situation and begs the audience to think "what would you do if this happened to you?". Acting is very potent, especially from lead actor Koji Yakusho. The story has enough twists and turns to keep you captivated and some actual substance as to the role of the paranormal in today's society. What endures undoubtedly, is the atmosphere of fright.If you want to see a scary movie, see this one. Note: For those who think this is a "Sixth Sense" knock-off, please be advised that this movie was made in Japan and that there were ghost stories there way before Hollywood. I saw this movie at a special screening, in the presence of Kiyoshi Kurosawa, and he was telling us that he based the idea for the ghosts in his story on various credible people he knows who claim that they actually witnessed ghost apparitions. It was a recurring theme that the room seemed colder when they appeared, so he made the breath visible to indicate that. The fact that he portrayed them without a face was his own interpretation and what he wished to express to the viewer.

A kidnapper is apprehended by the police, but the young girl he abducted is still missing. The police bring a medium onto the case to see if she can contact the girl's spirit, or at least determine whether the girl is still alive. However, the medium is going through a sort of mid-life crisis and believes that she and her husband can turn the case to their advantage. Of course, in simple minds bad ideas breed like rabbits, and soon this witless couple find themselves working against the police."Seance" is a fundamentally flawed film, cursed from the very start by an inept script. The film's plot rests on a mammoth coincidence, and the central characters become utterly unsympathetic as soon as they begin covering up for a crime they didn't commit. Stupidity does not attract empathy, nor do cheap scares. Granted, the ghosts in the film are fairly creepy; director Kiyoshi Kurosawa takes advantage of many shadowy halls and ominous doorways, teaching his audience to fear open spaces. Unfortunately, when neither the plot nor the characters give us a reason to care, thrills alone cannot carry a film. Cliches abound here as well, including the requisite psychology expert who--at the very beginning of the story--primes us with information about a certain type of psychic manifestation which is key to a scene late in the film.Perhaps "The Sixth Sense" was not the most sophisticated horror film of recent years, but the quality of this knock-off is nothing less than ghastly.