‘This Man’ Is Absurd, To Say The Least [Fantasia 2024 Review]

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Memes often take on a life of their own, and the J-horror oddity This Man is a particularly bizarre example of an online phenomenon escaping containment and becoming something else. What that something else is changes from scene to scene, and sometimes even moment to moment. It’s not correct to call this movie a “roller coaster ride,” as that phrase implies that there is a set of tracks upon which the film is running in a deliberately engineered and controlled way. A better metaphor might be a car with broken steering that’s about to drive into a ditch. 

The baseline level of weirdness in this movie is already quite high, given that it can be succinctly and inadequately described as a slasher-movie take on Dream Scenario with elements of The Ring and Final Destination. Supposedly there’s some satire of the Japanese government’s response to COVID-19 in there, and it does kinda work when you think about it. How else do you explain the absurd sense of fatalism in this movie, in which an entire nation decides it’s been beaten by a guy with a pasted-on unibrow before it even attempts to fight? 

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It must be emphasized that this interpretation of the film has to be explained to you afterward— never a good sign for satire—in order to make sense. (Perhaps it comes through more clearly to Japanese audiences?) The experience of actually watching This Man is more like attending a play written and performed by aliens for a human audience. The tone is consistently misjudged, the dialogue is random enough to induce whiplash, and events escalate to nigh-apocalyptic levels without anyone acknowledging that this is unusual at all. (Okay, that last part does read COVID-adjacent when you type it out.)

The plot can be hard to follow, given the many characters and storylines that wiggle into and out of the story like fish flapping in a bucket. Basically, the idea is that there’s this wave of mysterious deaths. As the story begins, ten people have been murdered randomly and violently, and the only link between them is that they all dreamed about the same man in the days before they perished. Once you see him, death is inevitable. You don’t know where or when it will happen. But however the man comes for you, you can guarantee it’s going to be fucked up: Think graphic mutilation, stranger murders, and even cannibalism. 

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Along with following the detectives trying to trace the origins of this godlike, Freddy Krueger-esque entity, This Man introduces us to a handful of people who have the misfortune of experiencing one of these nightmares, one of whom petitions a freelance “sorcerer” for help. (Another word for him might be a Buddhist shaman, as seen in the Korean horror films Exhuma and The Wailing.) The ritual works, but the sorcerer tells the woman that her curse isn’t lifted, it’s simply been passed on to someone else. Then the irony starts to get really bleak.

There’s not really much atmosphere in This Man, which is cheaply and unimaginatively shot and edited. The closest we get are the dream sequences, in which a guy with straggly patches of hair glued to his face with spirit gum mugs at the camera that’s placed under his chin as colorful spotlights illuminate the background. The style isn’t too far off from, say, the grotesque Butoh-inspired makeup in Teruo Ishii’s 1969 film Horrors of Malformed Men. The difference lies in the execution—or lack thereof. 

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Both Dream Scenario and This Man are based on “Ever Dream This Man?,” a deadpan conceptual art project (a.k.a. a prank) by Italian “guerilla marketer” Andrea Natella. It’s been circulating around the internet since 2006 and goes viral every once in a while because the concept is so appealingly uncanny. The man isn’t necessarily going to kill you, at least not in the initial version of the concept. It simply taps into Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious and lets human nature take over from there. And human nature is violent as hell, with This Man as its logical endpoint. 
The intentional comedy in This Man does surface every once in a while. But on the whole—with the caveat that there are layers of cultural background here that presumably make it a more coherent experience in context—the movie, like the man, is fixated on escalating its grim stakes at the expense of everything else. And it ends up becoming accidentally hilarious as a result.

If you consider yourself a connoisseur of the weird, you have to be able to say that you’ve seen it at least once

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