A few months ago, we talked about the 2000 live action Junji Ito adaptation of Uzumaki on the podcast. This month, my most frequent arthouse viewing companion wanted to take over calendar duties for our outings, and he expressed immediate interest in Tomie, based on a particular line in the blurb calling it a “peculiar tale of an evil high school femme fatale whose kiss drives men to madness.” The “kiss” element is perhaps overstated there, but this is nonetheless a creepy little feature that I enjoyed quite a lot, and is a much more accessible film than Uzumaki was. 

Tsukiko Izumisawa (Mami Nakamura) is a young photography student living with her boyfriend Yuuichi (Kouta Kusano), a chef at a local restaurant. She’s also undergoing regressive hypnotherapy under the care of Dr. Hosono (Yoriko Douguchi) to uncover what really happened to her during a recent period of total amnesia. She gets an update from her landlord that there’s a new tenant in the apartment beneath hers, a recent high school graduate named Kenichi (Kenji Mizuhashi). Although she does not meet her new neighbor, we get to see that he is raising a decapitated head as a baby, which very quickly transforms into a child, then a teenager under his care. This is Tomie Kawakami (Miho Kanno), who is not so much a young woman as she is some kind of evil entity, as we learn from Detective Harada (Tomorowo Taguchi), who comes to Dr. Hosono with a seemingly impossible story. As it turns out, he’s looking for Tsukiko, as she and another young girl named Tomie were classmates and best friends, before their entire class broke out in a rash of murders and suicides, with Tomie ultimately being decapitated. However, upon further investigation, he has found a series of such events that have been happening for over a century, all centering around a woman with the name Tomie Kawakami, her seduction of a man with a wife or girlfriend, and an outbreak of madness and violence that ends with Tomie’s death. He has come to believe that there is a supernatural element at play, and that learning the truth about what happened during the period that Tsukiko cannot remember holds the key to solving the mystery. 

As we watched Uzumaki so recently, it’s difficult not to view this film in conversation with that one, especially as they were also released in such close proximity to one another. Uzumaki is an artifact of early digital filmmaking, with sickly green color correction, Further, that film’s narrative demand for repeated spiral imagery also required the use of computer-generated imagery which was not up to the task at hand. Although Tomie also centers around people being driven mad and acting out violently, the impetus is merely the presence of a wraithlike woman, which makes for a much easier transition into live action presentation. We don’t see Tomie’s face until long after the film’s midpoint. Instead, we see her from the back, her face completely hidden by her hair, or in silhouette. There are no distractingly bad CGI tornadoes or hair spirals here to detract from the horror that the film is trying to convey, and Tomie remains a frightening presence throughout as a result. She lingers in doorways, she glides down the street in pursuit of a victim, and our lack of an impression of her makes this all the more interesting. She enters (or re-enters, rather) Tsukiko’s life through her extended circle, first by having her caretaker move into the downstairs apartment sight unseen, then by getting a job at the restaurant where Yuuichi works, where her (still invisible to the audience) beauty causes the manager and Yuuichi’s co-workers to start to compete for her affection, with disastrous results. Even Tsukiko’s landlord eventually falls under Tomie’s spell, attacking her when she enters the flat below hers and discovers the dead body of one of her friends. Eventually, the two are reunited, and their true history is revealed. 

Apparently, this film kicked off a franchise that includes eight more movies about Tomie, continuing the story from where it ends here (Tomie: Replay, was even released on a double bill with Uzumaki). This was fairly common practice for J-Horror of the time; just take a look at how many sequels there were to Ju-on and Ringu, both of which were released in the same year as Tomie. There’s not much information about those films online, certainly not enough for me to make a judgment about whether they’re worth checking out. I’m sure that there’s value in continuing to adapt the rest of the manga on which they are based, but this is a perfect example of an understated horror film that, despite being an adaptation of a longer, serialized work, functions as a singular text unto itself. Nakamura’s Tsukiko is a character who should be more widely recognized as an archetypical, textbook-perfect final girl. I appreciated the attention to detail that a woman with amnesia might find herself drawn to photography, perhaps the most documentarian method of artistic expression, as an art form, even if she’s not very good at it. We learn in the backstory that Tsukiko spread pictures of Tomie around school with “monster girl” written on them, and she has recurring dreams about this photograph that portend a dark reunion between the two girls in the near future, as well as a connection that’s more consequential than it initially appears. 

When it comes to effective screen boogeymen, Tomie herself is a standout as well. For much of the film, we see very little of her. In the first scene of the film, she’s just a head in a plastic bag, a singular eye peering out of it (which became the film’s iconic poster image), and then we see nothing of her face for a long time. Even in the scene where Detective Harada visits Dr. Hosono, he shows her a picture of the class of students that Tsukiko, Tenichi, and Tomie were in, but Tomie’s face is scratched out, as if the precise nature of her evil prevents her image from being recreated. When she gets work at the restaurant where Tsukiko’s boyfriend works, there’s a distinct contrast between the malice the audience feels radiating from her and the effect that her face, which remains in shadow, has on the men around her. It’s effective, and the reveal that she looks like a normal girl—a pretty girl, certainly, but no more so than any of the other women cast in the film—but one with an otherworldly oddness. This did start to come apart a little at the end, however, as I prefer her unassuming soft-spokenness over whatever was happening at the end when she was trying to feed Tsukiko live roaches. It moves from deft and subtle to a little too vibey, and the shift moves too quickly to fully work. 

Still, this is a perfectly fun late-90s J-horror movie. It reminded me of others from about this same time. In particular, the hypnotherapy plot reminded me a lot of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure released just the year prior. The conversation between the two films was further solidified by this movie’s violence largely emerging from people being mesmerized (although this time it’s by a demon). There’s also something very The Thing about the way that Tomie is an unslayable enemy who, even when reduced to nothing more than a head, will regrow like a starfish to restart a cycle of violence. Definitely worth the watch if you can find it. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond