Ju-on creator Takashi Shimizu concocts stripped-down semantic scares in this Sesuji adaptation
It’s once again an exciting time to be a fan of Japanese horror–not just for the wellspring of new voices putting their stamp on the genre like Yuta Shimotsu (Best Wishes to All), Ryota Kondo (Missing Child Videotape), or the folks behind the viral Fake Documentary Q series, but also for how older masters from Kiyoshi Kurosawa to Koji Shiraishi are taking their own inspiration from younger generations to reflect on and reinvent their own approaches to horror. Much like how behind Kane Parsons and Curry Barker there’s an Oz Perkins, James Wan, or Jason Blum eager to extend guidance here in the States, it’s fascinating to see how these established directors of the J-Horror school allow this sense of mentorship to work both ways.
The latest provocative example comes from Takashi Shimizu, the legendary creator of the Ju-on, Scary Village, and Sana series. The Mouths (or, from the Japanese, A Survey About the Mouth) adapts a novella by viral author Sesuji, who also penned the novel behind last year’s About a Place in the Kinki Regionfrom Koji Shiraishi. Sesuji has been open about the influence of classic J-Horror on his terrifying net-based novels, including that of Shiraishi and Shimizu respectively; at the same time, his work carries with it the challenge of unadaptability at first blush, whether rooted in Kinki’s internet ephemera or, in The Mouths’ case, separate transcripts from characters deliberately left undescribed, followed by an open-ended survey direct to the reader. Like Shiraishi, Shimizu is more than up to the task–pushing his signature fractured-narrative chills to exciting new limits.
Somewhere in the backroads of Japan, legend tells of a cursed tree tucked away in a forgotten cemetery. Local youths dare themselves to provoke the curse’s wrath by getting as close to the tree as possible–but two separate groups of high school teens get more than they bargained for, plagued with mysterious visions, haunting cicada noises, and the disappearance of one of their own. Their resulting individual testimony–pored over by a local detective–reveals bitter betrayals, hidden dark sides, and a cosmic horror that seems to thrive within the buried grudges that already bind these teens together.
While The Mouths begins in the quickly familiar tropes of bubbly teens on an urban legend hunt, Shimizu takes their dark and winding road down into some mesmerizing formal and thematic territory. The sinister opening visuals are quickly subsumed by extended direct-to-camera monologues that evoke Tout Va Bien or The Vast of Night–or, more directly, Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (another admitted influence on Sesuji x Shimizu). The characters’ sincerity and stares are equally piercing, melting away a feeling of passive spectatorship to draw viewers deeper into the story–and for Shimizu’s unseen scares to burrow under our skin.
While Shimizu has long-proved himself adept at teasing out unseen terror, it’s remarkable just how much restraint he shows in crafting the creepiness infused throughout The Mouths. It’s far from a jarring experience, deftly bouncing between these interviews and brief, spine-tingling moments of characters stalked by bizarre forces. Directing from a script by Masahiro Yamaura, Shimizu makes it clear something else beyond what we’re being told is afoot–but it remains elusive, the truth dangling at our periphery like the legs of a spectral hanging body. What caught me the most off guard is how The Mouths is less a bone-cracking, throat-croaking bloodfest like Shimizu’s earlier fare than a deeply psychological thriller whose formal and thematic line of questioning forces us to frequently reflect on our own perception of the film’s events as much as the characters’.
Like Kinki and its source material, the thrill of another Sesuji outing is discovery–not just of what force is behind the horror, but why these left-behind documents are the methods through which we come to know it. Shimizu is quite conscious of this–translating the blankness of Sesuji’s unsettlingly nondescript interviews into a compelling screenplay structure that packs its patient revelations with a surprising amount of emotional pathos. We don’t need the sting of a specter hiding under our bed to augment the horror of realizing what the person closest to us is capable of–though it can certainly add a bit of spice to the mix. At its core, The Mouths’ initial fascination with the familiar trappings of toshi densetsu urban legends is mere pretext to explore darker sides of human nature, agog at what lurks in dark corners inward as much as out.
Japanese horror continues to push itself into self-reflexive territory, and both old and new generations of creators draw inspiration from the genre’s modern classics — films that first made their mark abroad through subtle scares rather than follow in an international tradition of violent shocks.
Shimizu’s The Mouths evolves his own lineage beautifully by resisting his once-signature impulse to answer his films’ most dread-laden questions with outright terror. Instead, Shimizu now lets something far more sinister sit inside the suffocating silence. It’s more frightening, and more effective, than any jump scare — because it gives our individual fears the chilling power to fill the looming void.
The Mouths had its North American premiere at Fantasia 2026, where it currently seeks North American distribution.
