With their established codes and logic of expectation, genre films have proven a fertile ground for experimentation. The horror genre in particular allows filmmakers great latitude in exploring uncanny or illogical motifs with spectacular visuals and unusual narrative forms. Such is the case with Toshio Matsumoto’s Dogura Magura (1988), but which presses beyond mere play with conventions, entering genuinely uncharted waters. Set in Taisho 15 (1926), Dogura Magura recounts the story of Ichiro Kure (Yôji Matsuda), a young medical student who awakens in the Kyushu Psychiatric Hospital, unsure of who and where he is. As doctors Wakabayashi (Hideo Murota) and Masaki (the late rakugoka Shijaku Katsura) treat his amnesia in an attempt to recover Ichiro’s memory, we learn that both his mother and fiancée have been murdered. Who was the killer? Perhaps Ichiro’s memory holds the answer.
Given Ichiro’s loss of memory, we must rely on the accounts given by Wakabayashi and Masaki, but it is soon evident that they are embroiled in a complex professional rivalry. How does the doctors’ drive for knowledge collide with their sense of moral responsibility? Or, to state it more simply, and in terms that recall the myth of Oedipus, where does the desire for knowledge end? A complex, multi-layered work, Dogura Magura expands on Matsumoto’s earlier narrative experiments, posing the problem of cinematic pleasure, prompting us to reflect on modes of storytelling that disorient and disconcert, and on the contours of our desire for the codes of certitude.
M. Downing Roberts
M. Downing Roberts