Toshiyuki Mizutani’s debut (and to date only) directorial effort, Isola, . . . . It’d be better if we simply moved forward through the proceedings in order to avoid humoring the feature any more than is completely necessary.
Psychic Yukari Kamo (Yoshino Kimura) arrives in Kobe at the beginning of 1995 after a 7.2 earthquake ravishes the city. While aiding the victims of the calamity at a local shelter, she encounters Chihiro Moritani (Yû Kurosawa), a girl with multiple personality disorder. Instantly identifying with the social outcast, Kamo attempts to aide the hapless female before discovering that Moritani’s thirteenth personality, Isola, is homicidal.
Um . . . yeah. Whatever Mizutani and his gaggle of screenwriters were attempting to do with Isola, they got lost in the overly convoluted plot sometime around the first line. J-horror is known for its dramatic, cognitively-challenging twists and turns yet, regardless of nationality, a story must have a point. Granted, with the introduction of a city devastated by an earthquake prior to the entrance of two unstable individuals amid a motif of social outcasts looking for acceptance, Isola possesses thematic strands yet Mizutani fails to direct them to any effective ends. This is due largely to the filmmaker attempting to do too much with too little as the viewer becomes consumed with making heads or tails of the plot, to say nothing of discerning the film’s message.
At first, we are led to believe that the feature will merely be a dual of psychological wits as Kamo attempts to lure the murderous personage of Isola out of Moritani. As such, the old adage that a person enters the field of psychology, not so much with the agenda of helping other as one’s primary motive, but to–first and foremost–aide him or herself in one’s own mental difficulties. This is the promising road which Mizutani first seemed to be traveling down. However, midway through the feature the director introduces the theme of out-of-body experiences and implies that Moritani is absorbing the disembodied spirits (damn soul thieves . . . ). This is before he quickly follows with the idea that Yayoi Takano (Makiko Watanabe), one of Doctor Kazuhiko Manabe’s (Ken Ishiguro) failed sensory deprivation subjects, is the culpable party in that Takano’s soul–having no physical body to return to as a consequence of the earthquake severing her mortal coil–opted to cleverly hide amid the dozen personalities enclosed within Moritani. Yet is Kamo actually Moritani and/or Isola and are either of the girls postmortem victims of Manabe’s research?
Regardless of what does occur, the problem with any plot interpretation of Isola is that none of the seemingly countless possibilities possess a substantive idea. Though the notion of loneliness and the search for acceptance seems promising early on, as did Kamo’s self-discovery through her interest in psychology–much like the earthquake itself–Mizutani eschews any developmental potential either tread possessed in favor of futile ambiguity. That said, one is left with the feeling that the true story will avail itself to the patient viewer via repeated screenings but the fact that Mizutani’s storytelling is excruciatingly laborious and excessively trite negates any possibility of anyone bothering to return in order to ascertain his point.
Nor does it help that, by using the Kobe catastrophe as a catalyst for his tale, Mizutani flippantly and vindictively exploits the disaster while pouring salt into his own wound via a dedication to the victims of the fatal tremor. What’s more, Isola’s photography appears to be misjudged as its ratios suggest it was shot for television. Worse yet is the impenitently plagiaristic finale which would have exhibited more integrity if it would have literally dubbed the climax of William Friedkin’s The Exorcist.
Thus, in short, it is no surprise that Toshiyuki Mizutani has yet to director another feature after Isola. Thank God for small favors . . .
-Egregious Gurnow
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
