[KFCC] Charisma Review

Story: A detective is sent on leave after messing up a hostage situation. He decides to leave the city and end up in the wilderness not so far from the hostage incident. After getting lost and spending the night in the forest he meets a group of tree planters and is told about a lunatic who protects a strange tree. The detectives goes and meets the strange hermit who protects the tree and befriends him, together they try to nurse the tree back to health. It seems everyone is interested in that tree which is called Charisma, from the tree planters to a professor of botany. As the days goes by the detective uncovers that it is more of a sick obsession that everyone has rather than a simple interest.

Review: Charisma is a hard movie to classify, it has some mystery and thriller elements but these easily become background noise to the general weird atmosphere of the movie. After 15 minutes into the movie is becomes clear that it is going to be surreal and very metaphorical. This is a movie that you could spend hours taking apart and looking for the underlying meanings. From the tree to the actual characters, everything and everyone represents something. There is no one way to interpret this movie, one way to interpret the movie is the role of the individual in modern day Japanese society, the tree representing the society of course. To the westerner this view will not really be visible but none the less the movie is pretty open to interpretation. The story itself is not obvious and leaves a lot of confusion , as mentioned the movie is indeed weird and surreal so expect to be confused by the actions of the characters. This movie will require the utmost attention to fully appreciate its intelligent content.

There are a few characters in the movie each of them playing an important role. Each of these characters represent a metaphor or a type of individual. There is one group of forest workers they can be considered as a single character representing their own concept. The main character (the detective) can be somewhat considered as part of the audience, as for a good portion of the movie he is learning about the forest and the various people without really representing anything or leaning in any direction. There is no background for any of the characters but there is a sort of exploratory development where you better understand the concepts that the character represents.

This movie is very slow placed, if you are a little sleepy and are watching this late at night you might just fall asleep. The trailer of the movie made it look more like an action paced weird thriller but that is far from the actual case. The story unfolds at a creepy slow pace and even the few action scenes in the movie are pretty slow adding to that all around creepy sense. Many people might find this movie somewhat boring due to its slow pace if they are not enthralled by weirdness factor.

The subtitles are very good on the DVD, there is quite a bit dialog to follow so be ready. This is definitely not your average movie, it is certainly not a movie that everyone will appreciate. This movie can be said to be a brilliant work of cinema but usually such things are not mainstream and not everyone will find it interesting. We recommend this movie to those who enjoy art movies and theater (analytical approach to viewing).