re:mote voices

Title: Chaos

Cast: Masato Hagiwara, Miki Nakatani, Ken Mitsuishi, Jun Kunimura

Director: Hideo Nakata

Japanese director Hideo Nakata has come to the attention of the world through his films The Ring and Dark Water. Chaos is a film that he did 5 years ago, and is showing now as the last film in the 2004 Asia Extreme season – inclusion no doubt being partly influenced by the news of an American remake in the works.

Chaos is a curious film, which is more of a thriller compared to the horrors we are used to from Nakata. A woman approaches a handyman and negotiates her own kidnap as a test for her husband. However the handyman takes the arrangements more seriously than the woman had expected and seems to actually post an unanticipated threat. The handyman pursues the kidnapping hard, but ends up with a dead body on his hands. This obviously complicates matters, though the handyman starts to suspect that they are more complicated than they even appear.

As a process Chaos flicks about in a non-linear fashion without warning. Which at times makes things difficult to follow. Though gradually the big picture starts to come together. However having coming together the bottom kind of falls out of the whole. There were facets of Chaos that I liked, describing a definite potential to the plot, and certain level of capability in filmmaking. But ultimately like The Ring before it Chaos does not live up to the potential and is somewhat unsatisfying.