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Stephen King has spent fifty years telling us exactly what unsettles him, so when he hands a new horror movie the words “amazing and haunting,” the genre tends to sit up straight. The film that earned it is Never After Dark, and as of this morning the official trailer is finally out in the world.
Magnolia Pictures opens the Japanese ghost story in theaters on September 25. King is not the only heavy hitter in the marketing. Scott Derrickson, who gave us Sinister and The Black Phone, calls it “intelligent, unpredictable and bone-chilling,” and “one of the best of the year.” Both quotes appear in the trailer itself, which debuted at Variety.
A medium, a house, and a secret
Never After Dark was written and directed by Dave Boyle, and it stars Moeka Hoshi of Shōgun as Airi, a wandering medium who makes her living guiding restless spirits out of the world of the living.
The official synopsis adds a detail worth flagging before anyone walks in: Airi does not travel alone. Her constant companion is her dead sister, Miku, played by Kurumi Inagaki.
Per that synopsis, Airi is summoned to an isolated country house by its new owner, Teiko (Tae Kimura), for what should be a routine clearing. What she finds is a grotesque apparition with powers that sit outside everything she has learned to handle.
Teiko’s son, Gunji (Kento Kaku), does not believe a word of it. Airi keeps digging into the property’s history anyway, and a secret comes to light. From there the synopsis promises the swerve the whole campaign is built on: for the first time in her career, her greatest adversary is not the supernatural, but the living.
What the trailer is actually selling
The pitch here is atmosphere over jump scares, and a haunting that curdles into something meaner.
What comes through clearly is the shape of the thing. A remote house, a woman who treats ghosts as a trade rather than a nightmare, and the growing suggestion that the apparition may be the least of her problems. That last turn is a hard trick to sell in two minutes without giving the film away, and Magnolia is clearly betting the audience wants to know what is worse than the monster.
Momentum ahead of the release
The festival run backs it up. Never After Dark took the Midnighter Audience Award at SXSW and then won the Grand Jury Prize for Feature Film at the Overlook Film Festival.
That is a strong pair of trophies for a film Boyle made on unfamiliar ground. This is his sixth feature and, per Film at Lincoln Center, the first he has produced and shot entirely in Japan. It is also the first theatrical release from Signal181, the Tokyo company he founded with Kento Kaku after their Netflix series House of Ninjas. Kurumi Inagaki came out of that show as well. Mutsuo Yoshioka, Bokuzo Masana and Tae Kimura round out the cast.
Never After Dark runs 105 minutes and opens in theaters on September 25.