As veteran director Kiyoshi Kurosawa observed when he spoke at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan last year, the problem with today’s digital imaging technology is that it’s too darn clean. Even the cheapest cameras produce relatively pristine results; “gritty, grainy images don’t exist anymore,” he lamented. That’s a slight overstatement, but when it’s possible to make a blockbuster with an iPhone — as Danny Boyle did for the upcoming post-apocalyptic horror “28 Years Later” — filmmakers who want it grotty typically have to turn to obsolete formats.
The low-resolution visuals of VHS play an integral role in “Missing Child Videotape,” becoming an embodiment of dark forces that lurk just beyond the limits of our comprehension. Ryota Kondo’s debut feature takes inspiration from urban legends and “The Blair Witch Project,” while showing that its director has learned well from the masters of Japanese horror, Kurosawa included.
The titular videotape seems like a nod to Hideo Nakata’s “The Ring” (1998), although Kondo’s characters spend much longer watching the tape than it took for that film’s central spook to crawl out of a TV screen. In rough, wobbly footage, it captures the moment 13 years earlier when protagonist Keita (Rairu Sugita) saw his younger brother, Hinata, vanish during a game of hide-and-seek in an abandoned building.
