Official Synopsis
In the house where a father and daughter live together, a heavy silence lingers, and an unbridgeable distance remains. The father toils at an inexplicable task, while the daughter goes through her days in a quiet routine. But soon, a strange change overtakes his body.
Review
Kenichi Ugana has earned the title of auteur. He has been crafting independent genre features and shorts since 2010 that range from bizarre shockers (Visitors; Extraneous Matter: Complete Edition; Love Will Tear Us Apart) to a heartwarming rom-com ode to filmmaking (I Fell In Love With A Z-Grade Director In Brooklyn), some decidedly more accessible than others. His latest film Oscillation looks at the strained relationship between a man (Haruki Itabashi) and his adult daughter (Reika Matsubara) and treads in both existential and body horror.
The theme of distance and lack of connection runs throughout Oscillation. Not only do the father and daughter rarely speak, communicating through notes to each other almost as much as speaking, but other characters — whose relationships to the family are rather vague — have very little dialogue, as well.
Action is minimal also, but that helps drive home the point of the film. The father and two coworkers move buckets filled with dark liquid but then rest on benches silently as people in the park around them go about their activities in the background. Long takes of eating at a kitchen table, smoking behind a store, and the daughter standing with nothing to do at the bar where she works that has no customers make up much of the film. Oscillation isn’t concerned with jump scares and visceral shocks. Instead, it is a meditative work that considers how loneliness can spread from a single home to the world outside.
Itabashi, who appeared in Ugana’s films Visitors — Complete Edition and Incomplete Chairs, gives a compelling lead performance. Matsubara is wonderful as the stoic daughter, and she gets to stretch her acting chops in two moving, pivotal scenes. The supporting players also provide impressive work. Some characters deliberately show little in the way of outward emotion, and the cast members embody them well.
Cinematographer Toshiharu Yaegashi’s excellent black-and-white work provides the perfect visual tone for the film. Yaegashi worked with Ugana on the filmmaker’s earliest works; sadly, he passed away after shooting this film. Special Effects Makeup Artist Mio Chiba does fine work in bringing the father’s body horror to eerie cinematic life. Composer Hiroyuki Onogawa’s score and Sound Engineer Noritaka Suzuki’s design combine to provide a haunting aural experience.
Ugana’s body of work is unpredictable from one film to the next. He works in a variety of styles but all have some element of horror to them, even if, in the case of The Gesuidouz for example, it is appreciation through punk rock music. Oscillation is his most personal work so far — he is also the sole producer on the film — and the result is a work that is both touching and chilling. Fear-fare aficionados who seek out highly original work need to put this one on their must-see lists.
Oscillation screened at Jeonju International Film Festival, which ran April 29–May 8 in Jeonju, South Korea as part of the festival’s “Mini Focus: The Possibilities of Horror — Ugana Kenichi” section.
