Lest my critical reach exceed my grasp Loft (2005, Kiyoshi Kurosawa) doesn’t play by the rules because the male impulse violence towards women doesn’t either. Two archetypes victim and aggressor. The timeworn inability for either of these two to recognize accept avoid or atone for their own accountability in this dynamic is used to foment the confusion we experience as viewer.
Loft unravels two competing narratives. Is it about a thousand year old mummy who seems to be able to move around on her own when no one’s looking? Or is it about a murdered college girl who’s come back in a black dress in ghost form seeking a reconciliation for the fate she suffered? Think you can figure it out? Because on top of that there’s the impossible to answer question of who killed the college girl? Oh you’ll get answers. The problem is you get one too many.
The only way I can begin to make sense of Loft is if from across a vast distance the opening scene when REIKO coughs up black mud it’s the mummy drawing her to the rapey bnb to expose the tall dark stranger who somehow has to stand trial as being held accused of centuries of male abuse assault denial getting away scot free showing no outward remorse using his looks and charm to elude justice and prolong the cycle ensuring the threat of perpetrating said atrocities on the next victim until he’s stopped. I think the archetypes reappear as familiar patterns because they’re interchangeable between those who are good and evil. The morality is gray. In real life it’s this sense of this happens to all of us not only the other. Or in other words it begs us to relate to these participants more closely.
Reiko finds that the rapey bnb she boards is where the college girl was housed by Reiko’s publisher KIJIMA who full on first degree MeTooed her we’re talking grooming sexual harassment employer employee power imbalance quid pro quo lucrative advancement dangling sexual assault murder dispose of the body type. And he has designs on pulling the same on Reiko obvi. Easy enough to follow yeah?
Except the tall dark stranger YOSHIOKA not only sees Kijima murder her which now forces us to question the chronological order of where we thought we were in the timeline but the tall dark stranger after intervening and attempting to save her all of the sudden asks her if she’s the mummy. This sequence I submit as proof citing Loft utilizes these key elements of ambiguity to translate a sense of self denial and how physical romantic attraction and morality abnegate the culpability of the roles of individuals in these schemes.
Finally my final entry in this line of questioning is the continually reoccurring instances of being misled into false endings. It seems like things are finally okay happily ever after but seldom or in the case of Loft never the case. One particular is so self consciously over the top Hollywood romantic swell score you see it coming a mile away. Good. Someone should for once.
What’s scary is how far Reiko goes to accept forgive and forget about all the insanely heinous crap the tall dark stranger has done. He’s like I killed that girl she’s like cool no biggie. Hell in this movie I even almost wanna give the guy a pass. He’s that suave. Even though he lives with a thousand year old corpse he technically’s supposed to not remove from the institute in her environment controlled habitat but he instead sprits her to his home and constantly takes to hacking her up to find out if she’s full of mud.
Okay so the mud. I wanna say the rich twenty year old hot corpse who while she was alive ingested hundreds of gallons of mud until her stomach and lungs exploded just to preserve her youthful beauty may have an agenda that broadens beyond revenge against abusive men. Not that that isn’t a huge part of it. I just kind of care more about her than any other character. When she’s shown for the first time and she doesn’t have eyes is one of the scariest things I ever seen. It troubles me but also desperately makes me wish someone would have saved her.
I think the hotttie corpse is a good woman. And the black dress ghost is evil. As a man I want to save the hottie corpse but if a man would want to save black dress ghost she’d scoff at them as she openly declares her motives she wants to take them to hell. Yet each are victims of the same fate. Each perpetrated by a mirror effect good guy and a bad guy to a certain extent. Loft haunts me with the questions is there a difference morally to the fates of the hottie corpse and the black dress ghost? Is the publisher any worse than the tall dark stranger?
