Mag Mag 

Some horror movies save their horror for the third act, revealing monsters, grotesqueries, acts of violence, blood, gore, and so on as the story wraps up. Mag Mag takes another route. Its first kill is in the first scene, and involves bodily fluid—not the one you’d expect—being sprayed around an enclosed milieu. It’s a pretty effective scene and sets the tone for what’s to come: this is a horror picture that’s interested in both fear and disgust. There will be blood, but there will also be snot and spit.

The story proceeds in chapters. One character’s tale get told and then another’s, a narrative style used outside of Asia earlier this year in Zach Cregger’s Weapons. Taken together, the individual stories in Mag Mag add up to a story about the murder of young men by Mag Mag, a mysterious entity that’s tall, female, shaggy-haired, and in pink. What exactly is she supposed to be? Well, that’s revealed early in a flashback. As with many horror films, sex is implicated somewhat in the origin story. There’s also bullying and body-shaming.

The film’s narrative threads are more than a handful, so it becomes a little tricky figuring out the thrust of the overall story. It certainly can’t be the identity of Mag Mag or its motivation. Both are revealed before the film is halfway. This, of course, suggests a twist might be coming. It is a decent twist—and yet as with what has gone before, the twist has its own threads. The result is an enervation of the film’s power, which it does a great job of building in the first few scenes. Perhaps the major plotline concerns Sanae (a wonderful Sara Minami) who attempts to figure out what’s happening after losing someone to Mag Mag.

As a first-time feature director, Yuriyan Retriever is abundantly talented. His orchestration of sound is impressive, his jump scares are effective, and he even figures out how to add a fun mini-musical somewhere in the tale. It does turn out, though, that his film’s main headache is fully linked to that abundance. Obviously, Retriever is a student of horror: he is quite adept at using the jump scare and a frightful, rising, piercing score to torture his viewers. The one lesson he perhaps didn’t absorb is the usefulness of brevity as a vehicle for terror.

At almost two hours, there is an abundance of screentime when the story doesn’t need it; there is also an abundance of characters and motivations, some of which destroys the film’s momentum. And this leads to Mag Mag pretty much becoming like a stand-up comedy show with too many filler jokes. A talented comedian—like a talented director—deserves praise for carrying his audience members to the end of a long show without boring them, but the utility of carrying an exhausted audience along should certainly be interrogated.

As the film goes on to yield its final secret, it seems to replace sexual love with filial love as its dominant subtext. This should be a grand twist—few screenplays are able to play the subtext game well enough to bait and switch—but given the convolutedness of Mag Mag’s third act, this twist is just a bit annoying. Maybe there is no need for subtext anyway. Just frighten us and be done. That’s hard enough these days. As one Mag Mag character says, “horror movies never really frighten me”.

Well, the one he’s in would probably do so. But first, it needs to lose about 20 minutes.

Director: Yuriyan Retriever
Screenplay:Eisuke Naitô
Cast: Sara Minami, Maeda Oshiro, Aoi Yamada
Cinematographer: Hideki Shima
Editor: Taki Yasuda
Producer: Daisuke Takahashi
Venue: Singapore International Film Festival (Asian Feature Film Competition)
In Japanese
112 min