Loft

2005 [JAPANESE]

Horror

Rotten Tomatoes Critics - Rotten 33%
Rotten Tomatoes Audience - Spilled 33% · 100 ratings
IMDb Rating 5.5/10 10 1328 1.3K

Plot summary

A writer retreats to a secluded suburban house to work on her new novel. But her attention is instead occupied by her archaeologist neighbor's newly discovered mummy and a ghostly presence in her house.

Top cast

Hidetoshi Nishijima as Koichi Kijima
Sawa Suzuki as Megumi Nonomura
Miki Nakatani as Reiko Haruna
Etsushi Toyokawa as Makoto Yoshioka
720p.BluRay
1.03 GB
1280*706
Japanese 2.0
NR
Subtitles us   ja  
23.976 fps
1 hr 54 min
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Movie Reviews

Reviewed by 7 / 10

great buildup.......and?

No living director anywhere can build creeping, gnawing, raw nerve anticipatory tension like Kurosawa. Aside from that? Well, it's a mixed bag. His new film, English title "Loft", twists slowly on your skin early on, digging deeper and deeper. And then it sort of just stops. The shallow breathed fear that he creates, having you flinch at every movement in delicious tension (What's that! Oh, it's a TV. Wait! What's THAT! Oh, just a shadow) is unique. His mastery of composition in the frame, of scene, setting, character movement, sound, are unparalleled. And in this he sets himself up. There would have to be one hell of a harrowing finale to bring it all to a satisfying conclusion. As it is, "Loft" creeps up on you, hypnotizing you in fear; and then it just waits a while, and creeps back away. Not to say that the (lengthy) conclusion is poor, in any other movie it would be great. He twists several cliché horror staples in unique ways, and even finds some delirious humor. But it just doesn't work well enough. You almost feel the plot stumble and come close to falling. Kurosawa's brilliance with horror is that he does not scare you with sudden movements, grotesque images and stunts. He creates dread, primal and powerful. His horror slowly leans over your shoulder until it stares you in the eye. Unfortunately, in "Loft", the audience wins the staring contest.
Reviewed by

Painful hallucination

This is a movie that requires a certain mood. It is dark, morbid, reluctant to show more than you need, very silent at times, very slow developing, it has enough predictability not to give you goosebumps... and that sums it up. what made me give it an average vote wasn't necessarily the movie, but the trailer. the movie was bearable, quite beautiful. about the trailer... then well, it could have been worse than that, with that pop song going through the middle made it look like a pastiche. I hate it how a bad trailer can set the mood wrong for such a serious movie. I know better when to criticize and when to shut up, but this had to be spilled.the dialogue isn't complicated. it has a few memorable lines, but they are all contextually related, like the one that says I'll throw everything but you. it seeps with silence, hatred, regret and misunderstanding.
Reviewed by 3 / 10

Pretty awful mess

Normally I like Asian horror movies. That said, "Loft" was just a complete mess. While the preposition sounds interesting (writer with blockade in a big house out in the nothing with a somewhat weird anthropologist as a neighbour whose job is to conserve a mummy), mostly everything else is either confusing or pointless.The movie takes a whopping six minutes including credits to introduce the main role, her problems and the "solution" that is her publisher selling her a house out in the country. I was quite baffled how fast this movie went through with these things. And for me that was the main problem of the movie: It is just confusing for most of the time. Rather often I took half of a scene to understand what time this scene is taking place in, where I am and what's going on. On the other hand the movie takes surprisingly much time to show scenes that don't make any sense afterwards. What is left is a huge mess of incoherently slapped together scenes without not much more than the basic premise holding them together.
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