irie (Eriko) is a sweet teenage girl attending high school in the small town of Kurozu-Cho. She's in love with her childhood friend Saito (Hane), and expects to marry him soon. But there are signs of trouble: A local teen starts stalking her. The sign over the local beauty salon goes missing. She finds her boyfriend's father hunched over in an alley, talking to himself as he uses a camcorder to record an unmoving snail for posterity. A fellow student commits suicide by hurling himself down the center shaft of a spiral staircase, dying with a smile on his face. Another student comes to class late, covered with some kind of viscous slime, and marked by a strange bulging shape on his back.
Saito tells her, "This town is cursed by Uzumaki [spirals]." And that seems to be the case: She soon finds herself witness to an ever-increasing number of tragedies involving that element of graphic design. One man is so drawn by the symbol that he perishes inside his washing machine. One woman is so terrified that she snips off her fingertips to amputate their loops and whorls. The very clouds in the sky form themselves into a helix, which descends toward the town in defiance of every known meteorological law.
As the phenomena grow even more surreal, Kirie and Saito decide to flee. But it may be too late. For as Saito stands waiting for her, the air is filled with the sound of cracking bones ...
No explanation—just chills
Uzumaki shows signs of being cut for this DVD edition. The stolen sign over the beauty salon, one of the first indications that something strange is happening, isn't shown in the film proper; only those who check the DVD extras will see that it featured an automated spiral as a design element, and understand why this seeming act of vandalism was even worth mentioning in the first place. Too, there's a reference to a dangerous fugitive, whose "wanted" poster is given special emphasis and never once brought up again. Finally, the film just seems to end because it ran out of time, rather than come to any memorable conclusion. If all this indicates ham-handed editing, as it seems, then that's a severe shame, because the film is otherwise quite successful at evoking chills from phenomena that should be nothing more than ludicrous.
The film is very clever in wringing multiple variations out of its horrific motif, invoking new spirals in elements as varied as anatomy charts of the human ear, millipedes climbing on furniture and leather straps that happened to fall on the floor that way. Even those more bizarre than frightening—a stratospheric hairdo that shows up in the last 10 minutes—add to the overall effect. One can quibble with the bored equanimity that a TV news reporter, driving away from the scene, displays after filing a remote update on nastiness of truly biblical proportions, but by then the story has a momentum that carries it past the giggle moments.
Of the leads, Eriko Hatsune is attractive and effective as the frightened Kirie; Fhi Fan is wooden, and as uninvolved as her boyfriend, Saito.
The DVD has a few minor extras, including the camcorder footage that Saito's possessed father takes of the snail; it lasts for about five minutes and is about as unthrilling as you might expect. There's also a making-of film that includes interviews with the performers. It's either a bad interview or an unfortunately revealing one. But Eriko emerges as exceptionally vapid.
