The Mouths

The snappy title might suggest a horror flick about shrieking monsters running amok and biting people’s heads off, but what drives The Mouths is not what goes into the titular orifice – but what comes out of it. While the J-horror clichés seem to be all here – a cursed tree, a long-haired ghost, young people screaming and losing their minds – Takashi Shimizu’s latest feature actually shapes up as a short and sharp psychological thriller bearing more of a resemblance to Rashomon than, say, Ringu.

Rather than focusing on how its cocky characters meet their sorry fate – and it’s hardly a spoiler to say they will – The Mouths offers a sound and sure-footed account of their demise through their competing and sometimes contradictory testimonies. Through their recollections, all is slowly revealed about what led them to challenge each other to a game of dare (and death) at a graveyard, how they look on aghast as their plans go awry, and actually how their grudges left them with a warped understanding of their relationships with each other or who their friends and lovers actually are in the first place.

Opening in Japan on July 3 before hitting the fantastic film festival circuit at BIFAN and then the Fantasia Fest at Montréal, The Mouths is the first of three Shimizu vehicles lined up for release this year. Bolstered by a screenplay by the versatile scribe Masahiro Yamaura – whose credits range from schmaltzy romantic dramas and hitmen actioners to the Japanese version of 24 – and with Shimizu flexing his storytelling and scare-spawning muscles through his deft handling of pace and atmosphere, The Mouths should serve as an effective warm-up for horror aficionados as they prepare for the arrival of what should be the director’s blockbuster for the year, the Sony-distributed Village of the Eight Gravestones.

The Mouths is based on a novella by Sesuji, a young Japanese writer whose specialty lies in shaping in “found footage” fiction: his breakthrough novel, About A Place In the Kinki Region, charts the investigations of the disappearance of an anthropologist through a collection of texts of various formats – a magazine article, e-mails, video transcripts and so on. A Questionnaire Regarding Mouths runs along similar if shorter and simpler lines: running to just around 60 pages, the book comprises what seem to be the dispositions of five university students about what they did at an abandoned cemetery one night.

Adapting the book to the screen, Yamaura has deconstructed the original by rearranging the novel’s episodic approach into something more conventional and comprehensible. In the film, the characters take turns to speak – first facing the camera as if recording a deposition, and then later through voiceovers. First, Shota (Rihito Itagaki) sets the scene as he describes the drive out of town, where he and his friends are to play dare: each of them will walk through an eerie graveyard, touch a towering tree oozing a strange liquid and covered with cicada shells, and then trudge back to the car on the other side of the lot.

While Shota and his buddy Tatsuya (Keito Tsuna) make it out intact, the latter’s girlfriend Ann (Ai Yoshikawa) vanishes. Through Shota’s voiceover, and then that of Tatsuya and Shota’s girlfriend Mirei (Momona Kasahara), we hear of how a disoriented Ann eventually reemerged from the dark but soon kills herself after a brief spell in a psychiatric ward. The young woman will then appear in the testimonies of two other students who also happened to have gone up to the tree for a lark after the first group: through Blair Witch-like self-filmed footage, the school-jock Hotto (Shoot Mori) is shown dragging the mousy Kawase (Tomoki Nishiyama) to the tree, only for them to run into Ann in the shape of a crawling zombie.

Veering away from the structure of the source material, The Mouths is anchored by a framing device in the shape of Detective Kusakabe (Shido Nakamura), who is assigned to crack the mystery behind these recorded testimonies which he listens to on his portable MP4 player. With his back story as a gambling addict only briefly mentioned, the hard-boiled cop doesn’t get to solve anything. Rather, he serves as the on-screen proxy for the off-screen viewer, his intrigue reflecting ours as we march slowly towards a finale bearing all the visual and narrative trademarks of Shimizu during his The Grudge-inspired prime.

Director: Takashi Shimizu
Screenwriter: Masahiro Yamaura, based on the novel “Kuchi ni Kansuru Anketo” by Sesuji
Producers: Ikumi Taguchi, Takaki Sato, Yuna Shiraishi, Motoki Ishida
Cast: Rihito Itagaki, Keito Tsuna, Ai Yoshikawa, Momona Kasahara, Shoot Mori, Tomoki Nishiyama
Cinematography: Tai Ohuchi
Editing: Osamu Suzuki
Production design: Yasushi Hashimoto
Music: Takashi Ohmama
Sound: Shimpei Harakawa
Production company: 2026 THE MOUTHS Film Partners
World sales: Shochiku
Venue: Bucheon International Fantasy Film Festival (Signatures)
In Japanese
99 minutes