Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. It is currently a muggy, clouded, altogether inhospitable day out, but I refuse to let nature’s frankly childish behavior ruin my afternoon. This has been a week marked by a variety of gratifying personal milestones: I released my last writeup of the excellent Simoun, caught up on both my Witch Hat Atelier and Chainsaw Man articles (currently in my drafts), and finished Mitsuo Iso’s fascinating Dennou Coil, while also plotting out much of the remainder of my house’s D&D campaign. I suppose it’s no great secret that accomplishing things makes you feel accomplished, but it’s nonetheless been a great source of pride and energy to see my “Current Outstanding Projects” pile diminish so significantly over the past half year. I’ve got more fun stuff coming, but for now, let’s explore some fresh films and Mitsuo Iso’s acclaimed production as we burn through the Week in Review!
First up this week was Black Sunday, the debut feature of the legendary Mario Bava. The film tells the story of a witch who is condemned and put to death by her brother, but returns as a spirit two centuries hence, intent on claiming her revenge and returning to the world of the living. Black Sunday’s narrative is loosely based on the short story “Viy,” but it also calls to mind elements of Dracula, particularly in its clash of modern medicine against ancient evil. But in terms of direction and set design, Black Sunday is Bava at his finest: shot in sumptuous black and white, the film is a parade of one gorgeous composition after another, elevating the familiar into the iconic.
If I had to describe Black Sunday in a phrase, it’d be “what if Alfred Hitchcock directed a Hammer horror feature.” Bava’s compositions and blocking always feel purposeful, but Black Sunday is impressive even by his general standards, exploiting the unique lighting opportunities afforded by black and white photography to construct an all-encompassing gothic aesthetic. The film even retains some genuine horror, with its central conceit of a nail-filled “mask of the demon” ensuring its place among the rare pre-70s horror ventures that can actually make me wince. An essential film in the development of European horror, and also just a plain rewarding, consistently beautiful watch.
Next up was Over the Moon, a recent animated feature about Fei Fei, a young girl who is dazzled by the legend of the moon goddess Chang’e and her lost love Houyi. The story was first told to her by her mother, a key point of connection between them that becomes her consolation and guiding light after her mother’s death. Fei Fei finds obvious comfort in this story of waiting for her lost love to return – and thus when her father announces he is remarrying, she sets off for the moon herself, intent on proving the legend true, halting her father’s engagement, and holding on to the memory of her mother’s love.
So yes, Over the Moon is obviously a story about grief, with Fei Fei’s journey echoing Chang’e’s own long extended mourning process. The main beats will likely seem a little familiar, but the script is generous to its characters both in how fully it explores their emotions, and also how confident it is in letting them become angular or even unlikable in the depths of their feelings. The cast is also strong across the board, with Cathy Ang holding it together as the convincingly wounded yet passionate Fei Fei, and Ken Jeong bringing his expert understanding of timing and anticlimax to the requisite comic relief role.
I also quite liked how unapologetic the film is about its specific cultural and mythical grounding – there are no on-ramps or compromises in depicting Fei Fei’s life, which unsurprisingly makes her attempts to protect that life feel all the more authentic. My only real quibble with this generally effective film is the song choices – the film’s musical sequences are more miss than hit, and seem preoccupied with chasing pop trends to the point where the film will likely seem dated within five years. Fortunately, the big numbers about grief and moving forward are both bangers, so the film’s musical indiscretions don’t really hit any load-bearing dramatic moments. All in all, a thoughtful story about grief with an emphasis on genuine emotional reflection, and an easily recommendable family film.
We then checked out Razorback, an ‘84 Australian feature about a tiny outback town that’s terrorized by a massively oversized boar. By all rights, this clearly Jaws-derivative creature feature should be an execrable clunker of a cash-in, and yet I found myself hooked from the start. While the film admittedly lacks top quality actors or even a particularly frightening boar, it is nonetheless elevated beyond reason by Dean Semler’s sumptuous cinematography.
In Semler’s hands, the Australian outback is transformed into a gothic wasteland, barren trees and abandoned cars reaching like skeletons and gravestones from bleached earth. The inherent inhospitality of the outback is elevated by his hands into something hateful and majestic, a landscape just as intolerant of trespass as the cold ocean. Within this bleak world, the cast are persistently cut down, rendered crawling and desperate whether in overbearing sunlight or menacing darkness. Sometimes our trawling of unsung genre fare reaps hidden diamonds; Razorback might not win any awards for its script or acting, but Semler’s photography makes it more than worth a viewing.
Alongside our various film adventures, I’ve also spent the last few months slowly munching my way through Mitsuo Iso’s Dennou Coil. Until the recent Orbital Children, Dennou Coil stood as the only production directed by this legendary animator, famous for realizing such seminal sequences as Asuka’s battle with the Mass Production Units from End of Evangelion. And indeed, Dennou Coil is itself an animator’s playground, featuring as much distinctive character animation as any feature film.
Released in 2007, the show posits a near future wherein most children are equipped with “dennou” glasses, augmented reality screens that allow them to interact with digital holograms in the world around them. Though most kids simply use these glasses to play with digital pets and whatnot, some take an interest in truly mastering this technology, and use their glasses to investigate urban legends relating to dennou spaces. Upon moving to Daikoku City, our heroine Yuko is immediately thrust into a conflict between such dennou investigators, one that ultimately threatens to drag her out of the physical world altogether.
I honestly found the overarching narrative of Dennou Coil terribly drawn out relative to its simplicity, and my eyes glazed over whenever the characters started going on about how some digital patch relates to some other product update or whatnot. As in Orbital Children, Mitsuo Iso seems determined to direct animated dramas about topics that simply don’t suit themselves to animated drama; hacking is visually boring and dramatically groundless, and Dennou Coil consistently fails to overcome this core handicap. A frustrating percentage of this series is dedicated to characters running in circles in order to account for newly introduced, vaguely defined digital restrictions, all of which felt like arbitrary make-conflict.
That said, while Dennou Coil’s central narrative thread is frankly a dud, I was nonetheless fascinated by both its overarching philosophy and many of its individual episodes, which steer away from the central, underwhelming mystery in order to illustrate various ways urban legends might be reimagined in the digital age. The series possesses a charming optimism that feels nostalgically reminiscent of its era, when the internet was still a relatively open-ended platform, and AR genuinely felt like the next big thing.
Through the dennou glasses, Iso hopefully predicts that the internet would be a vehicle for augmented reality-facilitated engagement with the real, physical world, rather than simply facilitating culture’s retreat from reality. And in its preoccupation with digital secrets as urban myths, Iso makes a sadly naïve assumption that the internet would remain a secret-filled Wild West, rather than a consolidated handful of all-encompassing websites. Hell, even the protagonists’ tech savvy reflects a retrospectively tragic optimism, Iso failing to envision that ease of use would eventually preempt any need or desire for technical fluency among the upcoming generation.
In its best moments, Dennou Coil’s simultaneously nostalgic and forward-thinking perspective merge into a sort of eulogy for local communities as they surrender to urbanization, paving over the sorts of walkable spaces and close-knit neighborhoods in which local legends tend to flourish. As lonely dennou creatures designated as “illegals” or glitches are lost in a sequence of impersonal system updates, we can tangibly feel the death of a collective childhood – though in those legends’ ability to migrate from physical spaces to digital ones, there remains a hope that childhood wonder might be preserved regardless of the era.
Through its melancholic interrogation of these fleeting urban legends, Dennou Coil evokes a palpable sense of loss, its pall of nostalgia feeling grounded and genuinely sorrowful. While I was disappointed by Dennou Coil’s overarching narrative, its best moments conjure the same sense of collective unmooring as masterpieces like Pom Poko or Patlabor, grounding their generational critique in the specific trials and tribulations of one small community. A messy, beautiful, and intermittently moving production.
