GOTH (2008) Review

 

Summary (No Spoilers):

Based on the book GOTH by Otsuichi, two high school students with morbid tastes become interested in the work of a local serial killer who kills girls by chopping off one of their hands.

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In-Depth Review (Spoilers Ahead!):

The movie version of GOTH focuses on one of the early stories in the book, focusing on the serial killer with some strange artistic tastes. And so the movie begins with a strange mannequin, meant to depict a real woman with one of her hands cut off at the wrist. It obviously scares some housewives, and the cops are called, making it a big 'ol small town scare.

The visuals of the mannequin "corpses" shown throughout this movie are absolutely striking, even if it's most likely done for low budget movie reasons. The way the bodies are posed, the camera's trajectory in showing it, and the lighting all paint beautiful scenes throughout, and it makes for a really weird state, setting the eerie, strange tone right away.

One of the leads of the movie, a strange and unfriendly girl named Yoru, saw the body, and this starts up her interest in the case, though she already seems pretty strange based on the type of literature she reads.

At the library, Yoru's busy looking through a book called Sleeping Beauty: Memorial Photography In America when she happens to overhear the other lead of the movie, a seemingly friendly boy named Itsuki, and remembers catching a glimpse of him at the crime scene.

Yoru befriends Itsuki by offering him a copy of her book All I Saw Were Dead Bodies by Megumi, which he's been wanting to read for a while, and in return, he offers her The Works of HP Lovecraft Volume 8. And with this newfound friendship, they decide to start looking into these murder cases.

Yoru takes her new friend to a cafe with a very unusual sense of style, shown from the anatomical model in the background and the walls covered top to bottom in image collages. There, they discuss the murders, as Itsuki explains how the murderer is posing the bodies and framing them in such a way he must be an artist, showing an unsettling admiration for the work. And here it's mentioned how closely Yoru resembles the victims from photos they printed out.

They meet up later at the river where the first victim was murdered, and Itsuki has Yoru place herself in the river in the same way as the victim, taking photos of her in a visually beautiful display, featuring a flash of blood coming free from the cut on her wrist. This has to do with Yoru's previous suicide attempt, mentioned by a couple of Itsuki's schoolmates the next day.

Sakura, the younger sister of Itsuki, walks her dog one morning. The dog's name is Yuka, a throwback to one of the stories in the book GOTH. The dog runs off into an old building, leading Yuka to find another of the bodies (once again a mannequin), which seems to be arranged in almost a throne-like fashion with flames surrounding her head, and her hand is also cut off at the wrist.

This is followed by a strange conversation between Itsuki and Yoru, where Itsuki confesses to feeling jealous his sister Sakura has a habit of finding dead cats and dogs. Itsuki asks Yoru if she has any sisters, and there's a really strange visual flash as Yoru obviously freezes up at the question. She answers by saying she has a younger sister.

The two meet again later at the strange little cafe, where Yoru eventually recounts how her younger sister Yu was gentle, unlike herself. She confesses to feeding their pet dog bleach, and then she explains a strange game she played with her sister, where they pretended at hanging themselves. However, there was an accident and her sister died on the noose. On the way out, Yoru picks up a strange notebook.

Yoru shows the notebook to Itsuki, and they find a lot of first-hand information including details on the abduction of the victims, and they find a hand-drawn map with potential body dumping spots.

Following the hand drawn map leads Yoru and Itsuki to a body far in the mountains, which is shown in a beautiful shot of the body placed across a red chair, twisted in an artistic manner, and clearly hidden away from the police, who may never find her... Itsuki later tells Yoru on the bus ride home, but Yoru refuses to be rid of the notebook.

Yoru tries to sleep that night, but she finds herself tossing and turning, with no help from the creepy setting of her bedroom, draped in elaborate reds and blacks with an eerie doll at the back of the room. She has a nightmare involving her sister and can't manage to get any sleep.

The insomnia hits Yoru hard the next day, so she stumbles into class and sleeps through most of it, but afterwards, she asks Itsuki to go with her to the local hardware store, where she proceeds to try different nooses across her neck. Itsuki picks one out, saying he'd like to use it to strangle someone, but he points out the scar on Yoru's wrist, suggesting she'd prefer to slit her wrists as a method of suicide. Yoru explains this isn't a method of suicide, but a way to comfort herself and sleep with the noose around her neck.

Itsuki and Yoru head off to go look into where his sister found the body. They have an exchange where Itsuki points out Yoru likes to stand where victims died, but he personally isn't as interested, more focused on the killer's motivations. He tries to tell her something, but a cop breaks them up and they have to leave the scene.

Itsuki calls Yoru up that night, and he explains his thoughts to her by saying, "The difference between me and you— it may be the same difference between those who kill... and those who are killed."

This is an important distinction between the two lead characters and their morbid fascination with the murders. And it also makes Itsuki's behaviors throughout the movie start to add up in a really concerning way, as his interests seem to take him down a darker mental path than Yoru, who connects herself closely to the victims.

And the way Itsuki spoke to Yoru that night clearly had an impact on her, as the next day she took her fascination with the victims to the next level by changing her wardrobe up to become one of the victims, a Nanami Mizuguchi, and even puts on a more cheery attitude as she meets Itsuki at the cafe. She disturbs the cafe's attendees with her behavior, and Itsuki worries for the danger her actions present, as she could very well become the next target.

After parting ways, Yoru gets a strange, cryptic phone call claiming to know who she is, and she receives a newspaper clipping in the mail discussing her sister's death. This upsets her, and she takes it out on Itsuki, no longer wanting to talk to him.

On the way to school, Yoru gets picked up by a faceless driver, and then she doesn't show up to class, seemingly another missing girl taken by the murderer after playing her dangerous dress-up game.

Itsuki tries to look for her by following the path of the notebook, checking all the possible spots he can for her body as he assumes she's dead, but then as he's sitting down to rest, sweat drips from his forehead and smears the ink on the pages, revealing to him the ink is not waterproof.

Itsuki decides to head back to the cafe with this information, and he sits down at the bar asking the bartender where Yoru's gone. The owner claims he hasn't seen her, but when one of the last paying customers leave, the owner locks Itsuki in the cafe with him.

Suddenly the pieces start to slot together, as Yoru picked up the notebook on a rainy day. The cafe owner had gone outside to look for it that day, but he couldn't find it. Either way, with the type of ink, it was decided the book was ruined, especially as the authorities were never alerted to the crime. So... it became pretty obvious it was the cafe owner. And what made it the most damning was the cafe owner's strange reaction to Yoru dressing up like one of his victims.

The cafe owner sneakily grabs a knife during this explanation, but eventually Itsuki plainly states why he doesn't intend to report this to the police, and the cafe owner leaves the knife and a set of keys on the table for Itsuki, telling him Yoru is upstairs, before abandoning the cafe in a burst of wind that blows all the photos around the cafe into the air, making a mess of the place.

Itsuki takes the knife and makes his way upstairs into a strange room, which has a very eerie, sterile lighting. It's the dismantling room discussed in the notebook Yoru found earlier. He eventually finds a cold storage freezer full of hands, all showing signs of slow decomposition.

Eventually Itsuki finds his way to Yoru collapsed on the floor, clearly unconscious, and he leans down with the knife held close to her, but he decides against killing her, as instead he wraps a red rope around her neck.

 

Itsuki returns to school, even as Yoru still isn't attending, but afterwards, he calls Yoru's phone where it was left next to her in the dismantling room and this rouses her to wake up, the red rope still loosely hanging from her neck. Itsuki explains this was the rope used to kill her sister and also the rope used to chain up their pet dog. He calls her Yu as he asks for the rest of the story, implying she might not be so reliable in her claims. And he tells her a bully like Yoru wouldn't try to commit suicide over the act the way Yu did, betraying her act.

Yu explains what really happened, how it was an accident when the rope snapped. Yu tried to save her sister, but her sister only berated and shamed her for not trying hard enough, and eventually she lost strength in her arms and watched her twin sister die. This is elaborated on further in the GOTH book, as this is one of the story segments.

The movie ends with Yu telling Itsuki how he's the only one who gets to call her by her real name.