aori (Hime), an adorable young Japanese student in a pretty blouse and skirt (is there any other kind in these movies?) is abducted, tossed into a van and decapitated with a piece of wire by her abductor. A missing persons report concerning Kaori goes out through the local media. A young woman named Marino (Mayu), seeing a picture of Kaori, remarks to her brother Kurataro (Kobayashi) how much the missing girl looks like her prized Marronnier doll: a handcrafted masterwork created by the reclusive doll maker Iwata (Ochyazukenori).
Kurataro, who runs his own puppet theater troupe, is having strange dreams about his beloved girlfriend Sayoko (Anjho) turning into a giant, lifeless puppet. Meanwhile, Marino and her best pal Mitsuba (manga artist Inagaki) get an ominous warning from a street-corner tarot card reader. Later, the girls are accosted by two annoying self-styled "smooth operators," who make Jon Lovitz's and Tom Hanks' flirtatious losers on Saturday Night Live look like Brad Pitt and George Clooney. One of the flirts meets a bad end: His limbs are smashed and he's turned into a life-sized marionette by Numai (Nakayama), the creepy guy who abducted Kaori, and who, it turns out, is the assistant to Iwata, the famous doll maker.
Numai is a very bad boy. Learning from his mentor Iwata, he has picked up the nasty habit of killing people and throwing them in a pond behind Iwata's home/workshop. The pond turns human flesh to wax, and dolls carved from the wax-that-had-been-human-flesh bear an uncanny resemblance to the persons from whom the wax has been made. For no good reason, all our major characters wind up at Iwata's workshop ... at the halfway point of the film's running time. What do you think will happen through the second act?
A mess of a manga movie
The opening of Marronnier takes place in front of a Starbucks. This is fitting, as the entire movie, shot on such low-quality video as to look like a big QuickTime file downloaded in 1996, feels as jerky, hyperactive and raw as a really bad caffeine high. Marronnier, as the collaboration between writer/director Hideyuki Kobayashi, head of the Koganemushi Scarabee puppet theater, and doll designer/production supervisor Junji Ito, the horror manga artist who created the Uzumaki series, should have been much more than what it is. The film is an attempt to create the disjointed, dreamlike feel of a horror manga. Yet despite the aforementioned twitchiness of its imagery, the film is as lifeless as the dolls that are its centerpieces.
Kobayashi has no control over his camera or actors. Each and every shot in the film feels like an establishing shot. The film simply does not cut together. The pacing of the film is awful. It is possible to make a surreal manga-inspired film that has a satisfying arc—witness director Higuchinsky's 2000 film of Ito's Uzumaki. Yet Marronnier is agonizingly slow and unsatisfying as a story or mood piece on its most basic levels. Surrealism requires a breaking of reality, but random and arbitrary set pieces for their own sake, in which characters wind up in a spooky place for no good reason and get separated for no good reason save to be bumped off don't necessarily make for a good and nightmarish movie.
Despite some fine and creepy effects, Marronnier is hard to look at. Kobayashi over-relies on blackouts and lens filters that inspire less a dreamlike feeling than the urge to go to the eye doctor and get checked for glaucoma.
