'Stigmatized Properties: Possession': Layered lead faces ghosts and show business
Now, Nakata is back with a skin-crawling, humor-inflected follow-up, 'Stigmatized Properties: Possession,' set again in the strange corner of Japanese show business where 'experts' in the paranormal comment on investigations of supposedly haunted places. Matsubara rose to fame as one of these investigators, though after staying in dozens of stigmatized properties, he has also become one of the experts.
Scripted by Daisuke Hosaka, 'Possession' has a lighter touch than the previous film, which took its ghosts too literally. Just when things are getting silly, however, something happens that makes even the more cartoonish characters sober up, as if they had reached into a popcorn box and touched a clammy hand.
Nakata, who led the J-horror boom with his seminal 1998 'Ringu,' doesn't do anything particularly original with his paranormal phenomena — from spooky, hovering orbs to an overactive Ouija board — but he knows how to create goose-pimply moments, more through the terrified reactions of the living than the jump scares of the dead.
The story cycles through four stigmatized properties, creating a story structure that keeps the audience off balance — just as you're getting used to one creepy abode, the scene shifts to a new, scarier one.
Shota Watanabe of the idol group Snow Man stars as Yahiro Kuwata, a straight-arrow steel worker in Fukuoka who dreams of becoming a TV personality and decides to try his luck with the reluctant approval of his boss, a failed actor.
Arriving in Tokyo, he finds the talent agency recommended by the boss in a rundown building and meets its president and sole employee, the suspiciously chummy Kiyo Fujiyoshi (Kotaro Yoshida). On the spot, Kiyo offers Yahiro a slot on a show about stigmatized properties and Yahiro jumps at it, despite Kiyo's proposed 80-20 split on his earnings, the 80 being for the agency.
Later, Yahiro doesn't flinch when a smiling real estate agent who is a stigmatized properties specialist offers him an apartment where the previous resident committed suicide — not even when he flatly adds that evidence of her demise has yet to be cleaned up. The stuff of nightmares begins to occur soon after Yahiro moves in, such as blood-red fingernails that emerge from the stained tatami, but instead of making tracks, he soldiers on.
Aspiring TV star Yahiro Kuwata gets a slot on a show about stigmatized properties where someone has died. |
© 2025 'Stigmatized Properties: Possession' Film Partners
While working as an extra on a beachside shoot, he meets Karin Harubara (Mei Hata), a struggling actor with a sweet, mysterious aura he finds attractive. They become friends and soon more, though Karin has a mind-bending backstory Yahiro can't begin to fathom.
Despite his skimpy resume as a movie actor, Watanabe plays Yahiro with a blend of rube naivete, raw show biz ambition and sangfroid in the face of occult phenomena that make him more multilayered and humanly interesting than the stock horror movie protagonist reeling from shock to shock.
Yahiro, too, grows personally and professionally while showing us what it takes to succeed in the brutally competitive show business. It helps, we see, to have a niche, though his — sleeping nightly with ghosts — struck me as a recipe for permanent insomnia. If anything, 'Stigmatized Properties: Possession' makes a compelling case for a career in the steel industry.
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