“Looks like we’re all gonna get cursed!”
Takashi Shimizu has been a formative name in Japanese horror for over two decades, and the rare case of a filmmaker who also directed his American remakes. Takashi Shimizu, first and foremost, knows how to tell a ghost story. However, his latest film, The Mouths: A Survey on the Mouth, is a masterpiece of misdirection that explores grander themes of regret, jealousy, the nature of storytelling, and how urban legends only gain power if we give them to them. The Mouths is among Shimizu’s best work and a strong return to form for the Ju-on: The Grudge director.
The Mouths is a story about storytelling. It unpacks a local urban legend – The Cursed Tree – where a woman’s ghost is said to appear if she’s summoned. When a group of friends indulge in this courage test, one of them disappears and the rest are left to wrestle with guilt and an intensifying curse that begins to wear them all down. The Mouths takes this simple premise and explores it through an inventive lens that turns it into an exercise in point of view. The film is divided into several different accounts of what happened on this fated day, with the audience left to determine where the truth lies. It’s a structure that’s not unlike what Shimizu has implemented in some of his other films, Ju-on included, yet this time it’s an opportunity to obfuscate the story through unreliable narrators.
This leads to The Mouths feeling like a horror Rashomon, where interconnected stories all break down the same paranormal phenomenon, with each new tale giving this curse greater strength. The Mouths breaks away from what initially feels like a telegraphed pattern and veers in a different direction. It cleverly subverts expectations by chronicling different groups of people who visited The Cursed Tree and examining their contrasting experiences, rather than breaking down the different perspectives within a single group.
These separate encounters evolve into a labyrinthine horror story. Each group has a distinct dynamic that reflects different forms of relationships, some of which are more toxic than others, which also keeps the film feeling fresh as it retreads the same general idea several times over. These overlapping narratives also switch between several different visual styles. There’s a particularly strong segment that’s told as handheld found-footage that heightens the horror even further. It’s a genuinely frightening segment that’s on par with Shimizu’s best work. The Mouths keeps this tension going and crafts really creative, consistent, and effective scares.
The Mouths looks and feels like a lost Junji Ito story in terms of how this existential cosmic fear grips hold of individuals and makes them act in inexplicable ways as they progressively descend into madness. Shimizu generates some creepy visuals and scares that bring Ju-on to mind as he utilizes many of the same tricks, but without it ever feeling like a hollow copy. There’s brilliant sound design, particularly with the deafening buzz of cicadas. This becomes a motif through the Mouths that ramps up the tension and terror without resorting to gratuitous jump-scares. It’s a film that knows how to do more with less and understands when to best implement its biggest scares.
The Mouths creatively plays with perspective so that the characters’ biases and prejudices seep into their accounts of events, leaving the audience to parse out the facts. The direction that The Mouths takes is occasionally tedious, but it deserves credit for attempting something a little more unconventional that goes deeper into the nature of storytelling and character. There’s power in words and how they can reshape something. The Mouths doesn’t waste a single word, and it uses them to transform this cursed ghost story into a cruel chimera of fantasy and reality.
Tone and atmosphere are essential to make this type of story work. The Mouths achieves the perfect energy that has a fun, self-aware sense of humor. This makes its affable central characters more charming, but it also helps throw the viewer off-guard as to when danger is going to strike, and from where. The Mouths evokes the vibe of a traditional slasher movie cast of characters who still avoid coming across as stilted and one-dimensional. There are some excellent, layered performances from Rihito Itagaki, Keito Tsuna, Ai Yoshikawa, and Momona Kasahara.
The Mouths: A Survey of the Mouth continually reinvents itself in a manner that’s sometimes exhausting, but ultimately turns it into a better and more memorable film that subverts the norm. There are plenty of fresh sequences that easily elevate The Mouths over Shimizu’s last handful of movies. It evolves into a practically clinical study of gossip and shared delusion that argues that lies and manipulative communication can be worse than any supernatural curse. There’s a glib nature to all this, and The Mouths isn’t necessarily as deep as it thinks it is. It still punches above its weight and hopefully marks the start of a promising run of new films from Shimizu.
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