See it at VC FILMFEST: The Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival (May 4-11)!

SATURDAY, MAY 6 - 12:00 MIDNIGHT - Laemmle's Sunset 5 Theatre

http://www.vconline.org/ff06/prog_24.html

REINCARNATION (Rinne)

(Japan, 2005) Dir.: Shimizu Takashi

Japan's foremost cinematic master of the macabre, Takashi Shimizu (the JU-ON/GRUDGE films, MAREBITO), returns to Danger After Dark with this SHINING-like tale of a hotel haunted by its violent history. With this, his new film, Shimizu has delivered a surprisingly traditional, linear ghost story that may be his most accessible film to date-and also one of his scariest. Actress Nagisa is hired to star in a new horror film that will recreate the actual mass murder that occurred in a hotel decades earlier, where a professor slaughtered eleven people. Nagisa is slated to play the professor's murdered daughter, and when the film crew settles into the original, now-abandoned hotel that housed the actual murders, Nagisa finds herself haunted by images of the murders that occurred years earlier...and she also comes across a camera that may contain undeveloped footage of the crimes themselves. While Shimizu's earlier films were principally collages of jolts and shocks that gave little importance to linear narrative, REINCARNATION represents the director's most engrossing storyline yet, and the film is wholly engaging on the level of a suspenseful mystery. You won't jump in your seat so much as you'll be riveted into it.

35mm, 95 minutes, color, narrative, in Japanese w/E.S.