Official synopsis from Japan Cuts:
Dir. Daihachi Yoshida, 2024, 108 min., DCP, black and white, in Japanese with English subtitles. With Kyozo Nagatsuka, Kumi Takiuchi, Yuumi Kawai, Asuka Kurosawa.
A retired college professor lives a quiet life alone, until one day he finds a post on the internet about an approaching “enemy” and the world around him begins to melt into paranoia, dream, delusion, and fantasy. Widely praised in Japan, Teki Cometh won Best Film, Best Director and Best Actor at last year’s Tokyo International Film Festival.
I need to state up front that Teki Cometh is a departure from the usual fright-fare coverage here at Horror Fuel, but director Daihachi Yoshida’s magnificent black-and-white drama offers enough surreal, supernatural or is it?, and horror-adjacent elements that I feel many readers will find it an intriguing watch. It is also a gripping character study that many viewers will find causes a great deal of self reflection after watching.
Gisuke Watanabe (Kyozo Nagatsuka in a fantastic performance) is a widowed, retired professor of French literature who now follows a simple daily routine broken up occasionally by visits from his former students and the occasional lecture gig. After director Yoshida, working from a screenplay by Yasutaka Tsutsui, introduces us to Watanabe and the other main characters, he begins playing with what might be reality and what might be the professor’s delusions and deep-seated desires, along with the threat spreading on the internet about an invasion “from the north.”
Ghosts haunt our pensive protagonist, and frightening invaders lurk in his world. With crisp monochrome cinematography that perfectly reflects the wistful, dreamlike mood that Teki Cometh boasts, cinephiles should find Yoshida’s film to be an experience that both gratifies and brings on introspection.
Teki Cometh screens as part of the 2025 edition of Japan Society’s Japan Cuts, which runs July 10–20 in New York City. For more information, visit https://japansociety.org/film/japancuts/.
