MovieChat Forums > Marebito (2005) Discussion > Torture/Snuff film at the beginning ques...

Torture/Snuff film at the beginning question - SPOILERS

posted 18 years ago by UberNoodle
6 replies | jump to latest

SPOILERS -

The film is him dealing with,the murder and torture of his family?
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If it is TRUE that he murdered his wife and "treated his daughter like an animal", I took that that snuff video at the start is from those events. The girl looks young, so it is possible that that is the daughter, but it could be the wife. He is so detatched from what he did that we watches the video of it without recognising what it actually is showing. It is only in his search for "fear" that he unlocks his mind.

From the point of view that the film is his inward journey, then the boundries of what is real and what isn't become blurry, and even non-existant. If the film is largely splintered and viewed from someone with an unhinged mind, then it is possible that the on-film killing of the woman looking for her daughter, who some think is his wife, is just a re-inactment in his mind. I do like the idea that F is a representation of aspect of himself he has neglected. Perhaps she is mixed in with memories of his daughter, since F is also the first letter of her name.

The film is his own distorted view of his wife's murder and abuse of his daughter?
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The other interpretation, but much more subjective in many ways, is that the film is his distorted view of the kidnapping of his daughter, and the subsequent murder of his wife. The descent into the underworld is again his own descent into his psyche. This makes the snuff film, just another peice of media he has collected. However, WHERE DID HE GET IT FROM?

All of his media comes from his own cameras, or has been recorded off TV, so just were did he get a film of a girl being tortured and perhaps raped? He implies that it is fictional, but it would be the only fictional peice in his collection. Perhaps he says so because he hasn't accepted the truth, that he has killed his family.

What do you all think?

[–] zorasguitar 18 years ago

The snuff movie has nothing to do with his family, at all, the woman he doesn't recognize is his wife and his daughter is the vampire thing, that snuff thing was just thrown in to show how sickly he was becoming.

[–] zadie-4 17 years ago

I think you might have a point; I forgot all about that movie. Scary scene, interesting but this just makes me even more confused.

I think you just have to look at this as a mediocre movie that doesn't wrap as nicely as, say, a tale of two sisters. This was just a very good student movie, as far as I could tell.

[–] 17 years ago

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[–] 17 years ago

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[–] zadie-4 14 years ago

You're absolutely right. There are a lot of weird fetishes in Japan, that are commercialized upon in manga and other media, that lead to a reinforcement of being into, for instance, middle school girls in uniform, being okay. Read, e.g., Ian Buruma's Pink Samurai--which while published in maybe the early nineties still gives a pretty good look at what we're dealing w/.

The problem is that the Miyazakis etc. of this world are emboldened by the popular belief that these fetishes are somehow ok by community standards. And even more horrific case is that of (I think his name is) Ogawa, who ate a Dutch woman he murdered, was extradited to Japan, which failed to properly incarcerate, and then became a celebrity on talk/game shows. WTF?

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"The film is clearly rubbish, apart from the cannibalism."

[–] KenMishima 11 years ago

I'm pretty sure that snuff film at the beginning was actually him torturing his daughter. You never get a good look at the guy's face, which to me shows that it's intentional to be that ambiguous, it's not meant to be random. She tortured his daughter so horribly that she basically wasn't even human anymore, scarred beyond belief both mentally and physically, hence her behavior in the film as some weird creature who feasts on blood alone.

He evidently became so bored and aimless with his life that he at some point acquired the desire to be overcome with insanity and fear. I think a lot of the weird surreal imagery in the film is basically his further descent into madness. He only kills his wife later in the film. No way it was her being tortured, because otherwise she wouldn't appear so calm and act like it never happened, and she clearly didn't know what happened to their daughter F (Fuyumi).

To thing I don't know is where he put their daughter or where was she really at. I doubt he actually took some hidden entrance to another world and she just happened to be there. Maybe that was really him going to some underground lair he built himself, and she was chained up to a wall or something. He probably went their periodically to "feed" her and keep her alive, but that doesn't explain how he acts surprised when he sees her for the "first time" in the film, though I guess that can be explained by his obvious madness.

The end of the film when he looks terrified as she stares at him, almost innocently with the camera -- I think that's when he finally found his ultimate fear, which was to not be looking at the world through the cameras and monitors, but for someone else to be looking at him. For whatever reason, this blew his mind to the point of not even being able to function. I don't know what symbolism there could be in his fear of not seeing the world through his cameras (he pretty much has a camera with him at any given moment in the film), but there you go.