Pray | DVD Review

Pray is less a horror movie than it is a thriller. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work as either one – It’s too tame to be frightening and too confusing to be thrilling.

Synopsis

In so far as I can make out, here’s the plot:

Mitsuru (M) and Yasuda (M) are childhood friends. Mitsuru and Maki (F) are dating and/or partners in crime. Maki and Yasuda are secretly dating and/or secretly partners in crime.

At first it seems that Maki (Asami Mizukawa) and Mitsuru (Tetsuji Tamayama) have randomly kidnapped a small child to score ransom money for drugs. As it turns out, Maki and Yasuda secretly planned to use the kidnapping as a pretense to get Mitsuru to head to an abandoned grade school so they could knock him off and live happily ever after. Unfortunately, once at the school they all discover two things: 1) an unhappy ghost waiting in the wings with a grudge and an x-acto blade, and 2) the kidnapped child is actually a reincarnation of Mitsuru’s dead sister. The unhappy ghost is a young girl who had a crush on Yasuda in school, was devastated to learn she was not the only girl in his life, killed herself and now wants bloody revenge. The abductee is actually Mitsuru’s reincarnated younger sister whom he saw die before his eyes as a child and whose death he has since blamed on himself. She is there, it seems, to help him get over his feelings of guilt. More people show up at the school and one by one they start to die. By the time everyone’s figured out what’s going on, well, let’s just say they’re no longer in any condition to leave.

Review

Director Yuichi Sato brings us this latest J-horror entry and I can assure you it’s not easy figuring out what’s going on here. The main problem with this film is that there are two very seperate storylines happening that ultimately don’t have anything to do with each other. There is 1) the rebirth of Mitsuru’s dead sister and the touching reconciliation that she helps him to achieve and 2) the ghost plot involving the jilted schoolgirl. The only connection is that Sato uses the two plotlines to get the viewer to ask these questions: Are the two dead girls working together? Are they in opposition to each other? Are they one in the same? That’s fine, I suppose, except that their paths never cross and in fact by the end of the film they’ve had absolutely nothing to do with each other. Like two seperate films spliced together for no other reason than to sow confusion. In other words, cheap manipulation.

Some of the critical dialogue just doesn’t make sense, and as a result adds to overall confusion. There’s no shortage of recurring iconography, some obvious, some mystifying: a slide, a piano, yellow hats, electric shocks (?) and a regurgitating urinal (??). Please someone explain that last one to me… Even after having watched the film twice, there still seems to be some fairly large plot holes.

I should point out that according to Tartan’s press release, Pray falls into their New Generation Thriller series, “A collection of Japanese thriller and horror films helmed by up and coming directors and featuring a new breed of actors.” With that in mind, there should be little surprise that most of the extras consist of hot new actors talking about themselves. There’s enough material here for teenage girls to swoon over, but not much for anyone else.

The special features consist of a ‘Making Of…’, Q&A with the director and some of the actors, and the obligatory theatrical trailer. The ‘Making Of…’ is mostly behind the scenes fluff, little tidbits on the actors and off screen commentary. The Q&A session is more of the same.

As usual the overall visual and sound quality of Tartan’s DVD’s is great. The film however, is lacking. With Pray , Sato has tried to weave together multiple plotlines to form some kind of tight suspense-tapestry. But the very fact that they are all held together by the thinnest of threads has actually achieved the opposite effect of fabric being torn apart.

Movie rating – 2

Disc Rating – 2