It Comes

Hideki (Satoshi Tsumabuki) and Kana (Haru Kuroki) are happy young newlyweds, ecstatic about the pending birth of their first child. When a visitor shows up at Hideki's workplace, saying she wants to talk to him about Chisa, Hideki is confused - that is the name he and Kana have chosen for the baby, but nobody else knows that. The visitor disappears before Hideki sees her, the colleague who took the message is soon very, very dead, and Hideki begins to have dreams about a creature, about the phrase "blood calls" and about the fate of the baby. So, as anyone would, he turns to an exorcist named Makoto (Nana Komatsu) for aid.... I won't say more than that about the plot because it quickly becomes more and more convoluted as the (longish, 2 1/4 hours) film goes on. Many years ago, I discovered Tetsuya Nakashima's "Kamikaze Girls" (about strange subcultures among Japan's teenage girls, it's a fantastic coming of age flick) at Montreal's Fantasia Festival, and when this year's selections for that great festival included "It Comes," described as Nakashima's first foray into horror, I was hooked; "Kamikaze Girls" is not only one of my favorite Fantasia films, it's one of my favorite films of all time. True to form, "It Comes" takes all the horror tropes one might imagine, and turns it all up to eleven. I can't say that it actually *scared* me because it was just so over-the-top, but my goodness it is a mighty fine, hallucinatory ride!