Instead, I'd like to recommend "Real," a movie that is 2/3rds on-target, and 1/3rd way off-base. By which I mean: there is a big honkin' CGI dinosaur at the end of this movie. Yes, Japanese filmmaker Kiyoshi Kurosawa, the director of such deeply unnerving horror films as "Pulse" and "Cure," has made a movie with a plesiosaurus in it. Don't get me wrong, "Real," a horror-tinged science-fiction mystery that mostly takes place inside a woman's mind, is really strong. But that plesiosaurus is, like that hilariously cruel gag in "Murder by Death" about fat wives and big houses, hard to get around. It's emblematic of how spectacularly the film falls apart. No amount of intellectual justification can change the fact that a plesiosaurus (they emphasize that it's a plesiosaurus several times in the film; Plesiosaurus!) attacks two people at the end of this film. And it's every bit as off-putting as that sounds.
Kurosawa's horror films are not only immediately spooky, but they're also clever. He's more thoughtful than most horror filmmakers, and he shows it in small ways, like how he develops the idea of using something as clinical as virtual-reality technology to navigate the human mind. People in Atsumi's mind all look plasticine because they're "philosophical zombies," unthinking constructs that have no free will of their own. And when a mysterious dead boy shows up, he's often shown in ridiculously grainy extreme close-ups. This is how Kurosawa subtlely reminds us that we're experiencing reality from a distance. The same is true of the fog that surrounds Atsumi's apartment in her head: there are limits to what we can see, and appreciate as life-like since not everything in this film is "real."
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