liked it!!! Author: ecepilot from United StatesI was very into it. I think its a good movie. It has a very scary ending to a good story. The cast gives good acting for a good script. Great editing. Great direction. The wardrobe was okay. The scene lighting was okay. The score was good. So-so special effects. Very good sound designs. Good make up. So so visual affects editing. Screenplay is OK and funny. Producers did a good job. Set design is good. Main ghost is scary. Actual blood used is OK not great. Good filming of tokyo and all Japan. Good surprises. Car for the cop is dumb but that is japan I guess. Kill scenes are good. Acting of Japanese people is very good. Best part is ending and which is very creepy. Good movie for most everyone

I've always been a fan of older horror movies, the kind that require some thought and the viewer to be paying attention. I'm talking black and white, early 70's, gritty stories that let the imagination fun wild instead of seeing dismembered limbs and gory nasty crap all thrown in your face. That's why I never take the time to watch them.Enter "The Visible Dark." (I'm gonna do my best to not spoil the movie) Right from the first scenes, you're taken places that make you believe connections between events without being able to explain them. There are no obvious fixes and no easy answers. But the whole time you're wondering what the hell is going on. No one is safe, and everyone becomes suspect after a while. Also, trust and belief in people starts to diminish. You want to see the people prevail, but start to wonder if they can. Before you realize it, time is running out, and you're wondering if and when the evil will strike.The coolest thing is that the story is addicting without the horror aspect. The scary stuff comes along and disrupts everything, which to me is even creepier. Most horror movies I just sit back and stay guarded, covering part of my eyes the whole time. I stay disconnected the whole movie, and then after I forget about it. I near cared about the subjects anyways. This movie pulls you in and then drops the ax, kidney punching you with terror whenever you've lifted your guard just a little too long.This film leaves you effectively creeped out without being nauseous. I hope to see more like this again.

I saw this film at an advanced screening so I'm not sure what will blossom out of the current version. I heard some pretty wild comments from the audience. My feeling is that quite a few people didn't get all there was to get, which is probably just as well.This is a spooky story, and set in the real life legend of Awoky Gara Forest (OMG I cannot EVEN spell that word) and that's extremely tantalizing, to see something real, a true phenomenon get played out on screen... but there's actually something really weird underneath all the chaos.The main guy, Jayson is photographer. The validation that all the women around him seek seems to be the movie's central theme. It's sort of all disguised as a horror film, but the real horror is what happens to any human being when he or she gets infatuated with a lost love. That's what happens to the main girl, the blonde ghost.I'm pretty sure this film is about the dense forest of the human soul--that if you lose yourself in the infatuation of another or the vanity of narcissism, your loss is permanent, and you become this demon like vulture, who tries to drag everyone else down, because now your codependent sense of self worth is eroded in your nagging need to be validated by a guy.Buuuuuuuut, in this case it's not just any guy, it's a photographer, Jason. So he's not just a man, he's a lens. He's the great validator because he captures women's superficial beauty and immortalizes it. To the point where even the gorgeous naked girl in front of him, the first scene, hardly captures his attention at all, while instead he is engrossed in her 2 dimensional replication on the photographs. Every girl wants to be immortally beautiful. It's the vampire complex. (Not that this film has vampires in it, alas!) Jason provides it. But he's fickle. The woman seek him but he ends up turning them all down. That's the fleeting nature of the outward deification. The tighter you grab it, the more warped and contorted it will be as it oozes from your fist.He pretty much says it all in the photo shoot, yelling at the dainty Japanese model, then seducing her proper poses. "He's over you but you like it. You love it. It's a good hurt" (paraphrased). And that's what finally primes the girl. The hurt. An endless pursuit of the hurt.So I LOVED the ending. Made perfect sense. When the lens is cracked, and you'll get my reference when you see the film, the pain is over.The meta-lingual references are pretty much tripled when you consider that Jason uses the video camera in the end to search for his nemesis and Koshi (sp?) uses the hallways monitors. In a sense, there is no reality for these people beyond what the camera allows them to see, a confined perspective. That's the pathology of it.Solid performances for the most part bring a deceptively common dialog to life throughout the story. It's suspenseful and then it gets pretty scary. But, again, for me, the true worth is in the brutal excoriation of the human condition. Slash up on THAT!!!!: )

This is one of the better ghost stories I've seen in a while! And the ending is creepsville. Not to give away too much but the final scenes totally will have you on edge!! You could say this is sort of like a Japanese Horror flick but, having seen "The Audition" and "Ringu," I'd say that this film isn't exactly of the same odd J-horror ilk. This is more like "The Ring" or "The Grudge." It's a more thoughtful movie, almost like a police story at first and then becomes a nightmare in the end. There is one shot that is insanely creepy. Actually a lot.The shots of the Fuji forest are probably the real deal. Which helps. I got a little confused in the middle but the ending pretty much sums up the loose ends. It's not quite as well done as The Ring but it's in the same vane. Michael Madsen is good. And the hacker is great! If you want a good scare, this film will do it.