Watcher in the Attic / Yaneura no sanposha (1994)

Edogawa Rampo’s works provided such a fertile ground for Japanese film and TV that it is hard to sort out how many of his works have been filmed. Watcher in the Attic, for example, had itself been made at least twice as pinku films before Akio Jissoji’s version appeared. Of the adaptations of Rampo’s stories that I have seen, this is by far the creepiest of the bunch.

The plot summary on IMDB is actually that of the 1976 film, not this one. Goda is a tenant in an odd rooming house sometime in the mid twenties. There is a female playwright, an artist and his model who specialize in torture porn, a dentist, a movie-maker of some sort who is trying to invent a sound film process, and a couple of others I never quite placed. Goda is bored, bored, bored, with the same old people and the same old conversations every night. One night the dentist mentions that he has some morphine in the house that he had first intended to use for a love suicide but the woman backed out.

A new neighbor moves in, a woman who leaves during the day to play in an orchestra and practices violin in the evenings, but playing only one piece. Shortly afterward, Goda notices both a tiny leak in his ceiling and that one of the boards over his closet where he sleeps is loose. He crawls up into the attic and observes his neighbors through various cracks.

He sees a lot of sex scenes, some quite explicit in appearance though fogged,* but that is just more boredom to him. He becomes most interested in the dentist when he discovers a knothole just over where the man sleeps. Purely out of boredom, he steals the morphine, liquidizes it, and then uses the clichéd ninja trick of pouring the liquid down a string into the open snoring mouth. This overdoses the dentist and after the death he drops the bottle to the floor to make it look like suicide.

He feels no guilt and the act does not seem to affect his ennui, until one night he realizes that he himself is being spied on. The strange tenant on the lower floor has grown interested because the dead man’s alarm clock woke up the house, and a man committing suicide does not usually set an alarm to go to work. The man is named Akechi, whom Japanese audiences would have recognized immediately as Rampo’s famous detective (rather like having a neighbor downstairs named Sherlock), but he too is acting purely out of boredom. He explains how he realized it was murder and decided Goda did it but leaves the attic with no intention of going to the police. There is no attempt on Jissoji’s part to make a suspenseful movie — Goda commits his crime and Akechi figures it out, but this is not Crime and Punishment, with the guilty man in agony over what he has done, and no one but Akechi questions the suicide conclusion.

Though there is a great deal of sex depicted, as we might expect from a movie about a man who spies on others from the attic, those scenes almost seem to be a by-product of a movie more devoted to atmosphere than to plot. Photographer Masao Nakabori had worked with Jissoji in the seventies and at about the same time shot Maborosi, full of similar gorgeous images. Though it often operates in a world of shadows, it is often filtered as if in a haze and with tilted camera that emphasize the abnormal nature of the ostensibly normal scenes he observes. The music score by Isao Matsushita, one of Japan’s most respected composers and conductors, uses a very “modernist” approach rather than the ominous chords and shrieks of most horror movies, and it is extremely effective in maintaining a dream-like atmosphere. This is his only movie score and his very presence in the credits indicates that this was intended to be something other than a pinku movie.

In his seventies b&w movies away from his long Ultraman career, Jissoji had established himself as one of the great visualists of Japanese films, but one who seemed more occupied with making images than telling a story. Now that I see one of his films in color, the comparison that comes to mind is more Peter Greenaway than Mizoguchi. The artistic angles and imaginatively off-center lighting capture perfectly Goda’s sense of boredom and suggest decadence without the gaudiness or wealth usually associated with the term.

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Jissoji appears to have made three movies set in the same time period,**  the other two of which, at least in available plot descriptions, seem as does this movie to try to capture the mood of the twenties from which Rampo’s early stories grew, in which the intellectuals and artists seem to be caught in a mental no-man’s-land between Japanese and western culture.

You can view this as one of the most “artistic” pinku films ever made, or as an attempt to enter the mind of a murderer with no motive. Unlike Jissoji’s earlier non-Ultraman movies, it is short enough to not wear out its welcome.

* There are reports of unfogged versions released internationally, but the only version I have found is fogged.

**Murder on D Street  (1998) also features Akechi, but Akutoku no sakae (1988) adapts a de Sade story to 1923.