Loft by Kurosawa Kiyoshi has been so vehemently mowed down by various critics, that it takes some courage to write a positive review. Contrary to most others, I found Loft a good Kurosawa movie, not a masterwork, but certainly of solid average level.
It all depends on the expectation with which you sit down for this movie. Kurosawa is not a typical horror director like Shimizu Takashi, his canvas is much broader and artistic, ranging from realistic film (Bright Future) to fantasy (Charisma) to thriller and film noire (Cure). When you sit down to Loft with a sixpack of beer and bag of chips for a nice mummy thrill, you are indeed in for a big disappointment. A cold bath in the lake, so to speak.
Although there are some supernatural elements, I would rather call this a psychological thriller than a horror film. The mummy is not of the Egyptian type, swathed in bandages, but a women fished up from a swamp, whose body has been mummified by natural causes. What is more, we enter a typical, grey Kurosawa-world, and as in Kurosawa's latest film Retribution, the narrative is about how the past keeps haunting us, even if we think we have forgotten certain things we would rather like to bury in oblivion. Kurosawa pictures this in an almost obsessive way.
Reiko (Miki Nakatani), a writer with a writer's block and the nasty recent habit of vomiting black slime (ironically, she keeps on smoking cigarettes), moves to a lonely house in the countryside to find the concentration to write - an arrangement by her editor Kishima. The city may be bleak, but the countryside is even more unwelcoming. Next door stands a ghostly building, belonging to a university, where Professor Yoshioka (Etsushi Toyokawa) lives with the mummy of a woman he has dredged up from a nearby swamp. Why is the professor so interested in this dead body, in a rather unscientific way?
Reiko and Yoshioka get to know each other, but not much happens in typical Kurosawa fashion. It is all about atmosphere, and the atmosphere is great. When students visit the professor, Reiko is asked to take care of the mummy. The mummy seems to be moving occasionally, perhaps there is a message for her, a warning? Sometimes she also sees a young woman, mirrored in windows and glass, or standing suddenly behind her.
The editor proves a creep, at strange moments he comes barging into her bedroom. She finds out that another woman, another writer, has died in the old wooden house before her. Who was the murderer? She falls in love with Yoshioka, but her beloved cannot find release from his past, which in very graphic form rises up from the swamp at the end of the film. The swamp of memory, where the results of bad deeds are kept in mummified form till the end of time.
OK, the mummy should perhaps have kept more quiet, and definitely should not have walked (but this was a warning to Reiko, the other potential victim, so it fits in the story)... Kurosawa uses many stock elements of horror films, such as the breakdown of electricity - but these are not the purpose of the film, neither as the mummy is. He just plays with these conventions, to create a new story, which is about the horror of the mind...
