Ryota Kondo’s debut feature, Missing Child Videotape, begins 13 years following the disappearance of the protagonist, Keita’s (Rairu Sugita) younger brother, Hinata. When Keita’s mother mails him a videotape documenting the incidents surrounding Hinata’s vanishing, a long-dormant mystery reemerges like a resurrected corpse. Keita watches the eerie tape with his spiritual clairvoyant roommate, Tsukasa (Amon Hirai), who — unbeknownst to Keita — soon begins reluctantly discussing the case with a reporter named Mikoto (Kokoro Morita).
The mysterious videotape showcases the film’s first indication of Kondo’s directorial attentiveness; rather than doctoring high-resolution digital footage in postproduction, as far too many contemporary directors are wont to do, Kondo shoots the tape sequence in the correct format and aspect ratio. This attention to textural detail imbues the scenes with mimetic verisimilitude, a necessary sense of the past intruding on the present. The tape shows Keita and Hinata playing hide-and-seek on the forested Mount Mashiro, where they stumble upon a decrepit institutional building, which Hinata playfully claims is full of “puyo puyo” (a Japanese onomatopoeia representing the movement of soft objects, and also the title of a popular Japanese puzzle video game). Keita finds Hinata hiding in a murky hallway before the boy silently glides offscreen, never to be seen again.
Missing Child Videotape’s most significant virtues are in the intricacies of its folklore-steeped plot, which patiently unfolds with carefully administered moments of eerie revelation, especially surrounding the site of its central mystery. We learn that police never discovered the building where Hinata disappeared, and that an unusual concentration of mysterious disappearances and deaths have occurred on Mount Mashiro. During her investigation into Hinata’s disappearance, Mikoto obtains an audiocassette documenting a missing university mountaineering club also stumbling upon a ghostly building on Mashiro. In thematic and structural terms, the story abstractly recalls the likes of The Stone Tape (1972), written by Nigel Kneale. The film is bookended by sequences featuring an eerie bell that jingles in the misty Mashiro forest, evoking classic ghost stories like M. R. James’s “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” and the silent horror classic The Bells (1926).
Missing Child Videotape is an impressive debut feature, well-steeped in the tradition of late ‘90s to early ‘00s golden age “J-horror” — a cinematic cycle replete with metaphysical viruses, haunted recordings, and dreadful unknowing. It would be unfair to hold Kondo to the standard of the great Kiyoshi Kurosawa — or even Takashi Shimizu, Hideo Nakata, or Koji Shiraishi — but he shows himself to be a serious and thoughtful observer of quiet horror, scrupulously invested in story architecture, sound design, and the dynamics of visual space. The film contains many indicators of an attentive cinematic craftsperson — Kondo uses an almost invisibly slow zoom for a one-take exposition monologue scene to unnerving effect; he syncs the mountaineering club’s disappearance audio-recording to Keita’s climactic, frightening nighttime ascent. Kondo’s directorial style is intelligently presentational, showcasing an aptitude for visual simplicity through understated camera direction and deliberate editing. Missing Child Videotape might not achieve the levels of overpowering terror promised by its premise, but it announces the emergence of a new filmmaker with serious potential.
Published as part of NYAFF 2025 — Dispatch 1.
Comments are closed.