Trailers are an under-appreciated art form insofar that many times they're seen as vehicles for showing footage, explaining films away, or showing their hand about what moviegoers can expect. Foreign, domestic, independent, big budget: I celebrate all levels of trailers and hopefully this column will satisfactorily give you a baseline of what beta wave I'm operating on, because what better way to hone your skills as a thoughtful moviegoer than by deconstructing these little pieces of advertising? Some of the best authors will tell you that writing a short story is a lot harder than writing a long one, that you have to weigh every sentence. What better medium to see how this theory plays itself out beyond that than with movie trailers?
Kotoko Trailer
I absolutely dare you to figure this out without reading a synopsis.
What immediately jumped out at me was how much of a departure this is for director Shin'ya Tsukamoto, the man who last gave us Tetsuo: The Bullet Man. Long gone are the hideous physical transformations, his Kafka-esque metamorphosis still something to behold, and replaced with something more cerebral, intelligent.
We open easily enough with a woman suffering with double vision. The hook here, though, and it's brilliantly encapsulated within mere seconds, is that she seems to be suffering from a psychological double vision as well. The way the guy just lumbers and leaps is contrasted nicely with the hushed tones of our protagonist who realizes it is in her head and throws us the first in a series of thrilling moments which, in this case, is her devotion to augmenting her reality in order to stave off the terror that surely comes over her.
The festival recognition is well placed and timed in the way it doesn't take us out of trying to understand what's afoot here but the rub isn't that a kind, stately narrator will explain everything you need to know. In fact, things just spiral deeper out of control down a well of madness, but, for me, I am riveted by what I see. Almost like a wobbly can that is just moments away from coming loose of its moorings, the trailer just descends into dark places as the echoing sounds of gunshots fi
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