In 2002, American audiences were introduced to the world of Japanese horror with the remake of the film Ring, and J-horror fever soon swept the country. Takashi Shimizu’s 2004 remake of his film Ju-On: The Grudge, simply titled The Grudge, upped the freak-out factor with its iconic and terrifying imagery. Now, Shimizu returns with his eerie and unsettling film The Mouths, a classic ghost story done in the fashion that Shimizu has mastered over the years.
One night, four friends looking for a good time and a scare decide to drive out to a tree rumored to be cursed in the middle of a cemetery itself rumored to be haunted. Once they arrive one of them, Ann, begins acting strangely, forcing the group to call it a night and leave. The next day, Ann inexplicably vanishes, and the group is beset by a horrifying specter of a woman. Soon, a ghastly tale of jealousy and resentment unfolds against the backdrop of an increasingly eerie events.
Based on the novella “A Questionnaire About the Mouth”, this film is tremendously unnerving. Relying more on crafting an intense atmosphere of fear early on and maintaining throughout and not just scary imagery. The entire film feels absolutely laden with dread, and while there are snippets of visual terror (the female ghost made me shut my laptop the first time we see her) much of the fear comes from a constant expectation that something horrific is about to happen, especially after our first glimpse of said ghost. The shots of the cemetery at night, and even the road on the way there being lit up by headlights are starkly and simply effective. The structure of the film (the characters being interviewed about what happened) gives it an unsettling Unsolved Mysteries vibe. Not that it lends the film an air of realism but more in that it simply strikes that same primal fear inside of you that Unsolved Mysteries did.
Chillingly atmospheric and wrought with a handful of genuinely scary images, The Mouths is exactly what you want it to be. It will keep you guessing as to why what happened happened and never gets bogged down in exposition or mythology. Rather, it’s simply tells a terrifying story and doesn’t try to do any more than that.
