Fantastic Fest invites you through the "DOOR"!

The reasons for the inclusion of older films into a film festival’s lineup are always cause for reexamination.  Fantastic Fest is typically a platform for newer movies to find an audience (and a home), so why show films from several decades ago?  Is it an anniversary?  Did one of the filmmakers pass away?  Director Banmei Takahashi is still alive and his 1988 Japanese thriller “Door” is as current as ever.

Yasuko is a repressed housewife in 1980s Japan.  She lives in an apartment with her husband Satoru and young son Takuto.  Though she dresses up at home to look presentable, she rarely leaves and her only “companions” are solicitors who call or approach looking to sell her things she doesn’t need.  When one unhinged salesman tries to slip papers through an opening in the apartment's front door, she instinctively closes it on his hand, much to their mutual surprise.  Of course, he begins obsessing over Yasuko and stalks her throughout the course of the film as the men in her life brush her off. 

Yasuko needs better locks.

While the subject matter is unfortunately still prescient, the film feels dated in several different ways.  The jazzy electro-synth score comes in and out and screams the 1980’s, but that could just add to its nostalgic appeal.  Towards the end, it starts to sound like a video game.  There’s even an extended, one-take chase towards the end that can't help but echo “John Wick 4” or vice versa. Some of the staging also starts to feel melodramatic despite the committed performances of Keiko Takahashi as Yasuko (and Banmei’s real-life spouse) and Dajiro Tsutsumi as Yamakawa, the perverted salesman who wants to penetrate Yasuko in just about every way imaginable.  He’s as horny as he is dangerous, and their face-off in the last act is just bonkers. Let’s just say, the film has a “Chekhov’s Chainsaw.” (If you lived in an apartment, why would you own a chainsaw?  And why would it ever be just lying around?  “Door” doesn’t address this.) 

If “Door” was remade 20 years ago, it would have been a marquee J-horror remake along the lines of “The Ring” and “The Grudge.”  There’s nothing supernatural here, but Takahashi proves he was ahead of his time.  The film isn’t as gory and brutal as 2007’s “Inside,” but I would be surprised if directors Maury and Bustillo had never seen “Door.”  Hopefully, now, more genre fans will.

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