In his cryptic new film Whale Bones, Takamasa Oe attempts a “how we live now” exploration of disaffected youth and the aimless ennui of modern existence, ultimately concluding that the kids are not alright. The movie begins with Mamiya (Motoki Ochiai) being unceremoniously dumped by his fiancée — his feeble protestation amounts to “I already booked the venue.” Encouraged by a nosy co-worker to create a profile on a hook-up app, Mamiya almost immediately meets Aska (Ano), an alarmingly young woman who is as aggressive and outgoing as Mamiya is shy. The two have a brief, awkward date at a tea shop before retiring to his apartment. Once there, Mamiya takes a shower, only to emerge and find Aska passed out prone on his bed, a bottle of pills laying next to her. He checks and she appears deceased; in a panic, he loads the body into his trunk and drives into the woods to dispose of it. But by the time he digs a hole and goes to retrieve the body, she is suddenly missing.
So begins a strange odyssey into a curious underground culture built around an app called Mimi. It seems that Aska was quite popular on the platform, an influencer with a loyal following of oddballs who have noticed that she is no longer posting new content. The app itself is a fascinating creation, a kind of second-screen experience where users leave messages in virtual “holes”; in turn, users must travel to real locations to match up these holes with a place (think Pokémon Go if it was haunted). Mamiya then meets Rin (Mayuu Yokota), another young woman who idolizes Aska and is trying to become an influencer herself. As Mamiya gets dragged deeper into this strange world of hole-hunting, he begins missing work and further isolating himself from the real world. He’s riddled with guilt about Aska’s death and his cowardly reaction to it, and begins seeing visions of her ghost. Meanwhile, Aska’s fans become increasingly unhinged, eventually discovering that Aska left a hole in Mamiya’s apartment right before her death.
There’s a lot going on in Whale Bones, not all of which Oe can wrangle into a consistent tone or sustain over (a fairly brief) 90-minute runtime. Oe is likely best known for co-writing Drive My Car with Ryūsuke Hamaguchi, and there is an inkling of that sensibility here; the aimless drift of people unmoored from their day-to-day lives, for one. But where that film was expansive and enveloping, Whale Bones is diffuse and obscure. It constantly threatens to tilt over into full-blown horror movie territory, while also trying to maintain something of a procedural element — will Mamiya get found out? And why hasn’t Aska’s death been reported yet? Sequences that detail her followers’ obsessive pursuit of digital breadcrumbs via the Mimi app teeter dangerously close to after school special territory, while a subplot about Rin jumping from app to app in search of viral fame is abandoned almost as quickly as it is introduced. There are a lot of ideas here, but none of them have room to breathe. Everything is theoretical, ideas in search of a human touch. Oe does display some nice formal chops at the very least, demonstrating a predilection for off-kilter compositions and utilizing off-screen space adroitly. In one scene, a character is sitting at a restaurant table and another’s entrance is established by a brief gust of wind from an unseen door billowing their hair; later, the characters leave the restaurant and Oe cuts back to their now empty table, lingering over the space as if to commit it to memory. There’s plenty to admire here, but nothing comes together into any sort of satisfying whole. Melding Hamaguchi with Kiyoshi Kurosawa sounds tantalizing on paper, but proves harder to successfully realize in practice.
