3 days ago
Parental grief and spiritual terror collide in ‘Dollhouse'
If I had gone into the mystery film 'Dollhouse' cold, seeing director Shinobu Yaguchi's name in the closing credits would have made me doubt my own eyes.
Yaguchi has long been Japan's leading purveyor of smartly crafted comedies with a zero-to-hero arc. Among the best is the 2001 'Waterboys,' a feel-good comedy about a boys' synchronized swimming team that inspired countless knock-offs, and the 2017 'Survival Family,' whose story of a dysfunctional family forced to fend for itself when the world's electric grid goes down was both funny and prescient.
The premise of 'Dollhouse' — a creepy doll wreaks havoc on the humans around it — is a horror genre staple, one domestic example being Hideo Nakata's 2015 'Ghost Theater,' in which a malevolent doll spreads terror and confusion in a small theater troupe. But Yaguchi's take is disturbingly different, drawing on elemental parental fears and ancient strains of Japanese culture and religion.
Masami Nagasawa, who also starred in Yaguchi's 2014 'Wood Job!,' plays Yoshie, the mother of the cute 5-year-old Mei. She and her nice-guy husband Tadahiko (Koji Seto) dote on the girl, but when Yoshie goes shopping for snacks while Mei and her friends play hide-and-seek in the house, she returns to every parent's nightmare. Her discovery of her daughter's body in a startling reveal is impossible to unsee.
A year later, a still-traumatized Yoshie buys an old doll because it resembles Mei. That night, Tadahiko is surprised to see the doll sitting at the dinner table and Yoshie talking to it as if it were alive.
He plays along, more so after a therapist tells him Yoshie's 'adoption' of the doll may speed her recovery. Then Yoshie gives birth to a baby girl. Flash forward five years: The girl, Mai, takes an interest in the now forgotten — and very conscious — doll and they are soon fast friends. But the doll, jealous of the attention the couple lavishes on Mai, is out for payback.
In shifting from the psychodrama of a mother maddened by grief and guilt to out-and-out horror as the couple struggles to rid themselves of the doll from hell, the film risks losing its bearings and descending into self-parody. But Yaguchi keeps the story anchored in a semblance of real-world logic, while ratcheting up the supernatural scares and solving the puzzle of the doll's origin. The doll doesn't walk and talk like the menacing eponymous character of the American 2022 shocker 'M3gan,' who had the excuse of being an AI-powered robot. But it does evade Yoshie's frantic attempts to discard it, like trash that keeps implacably returning because it wasn't properly sorted.
The couple finally calls on assistance, starting with a temple priest who declares that the doll is cursed and progressing to a doll expert (a grim-visaged Tetsushi Tanaka) who comes up with a bizarre plan for getting it out of their lives. By this point, merely tossing it won't work.
From a Western perspective, the lengths to which the characters go to calm the doll's vengeful spirit may seem excessive or absurd. But in Japan, where the ritual disposal of dolls is a long-established practice, they make karmic sense.
And though 'Dollhouse' concludes with twist after twist, to the point of exhaustion if not absurdity, its ending feels welcome and right. Whether or not that means the doll is gone for good, I'll leave for you to guess.
