Tomie (1998) She may keep coming back, but the audience won’t be

One of the most common tropes of all time in media is that of a missing or murdered teenage girl — a horror story that is tragically a reality for far too many. Typically, the narrative opens with the detective protagonist studying the life of the subject of their case; what she was like, who her friends were, learning everything and anything they can about who she was to find an answer as to how someone could do something so horrible to someone so young and innocent. But… what if that narrative was turned on its head? What if she wasn’t so innocent after all? And what if, perhaps, the real victim of the story was, in fact, the one who killed her?

This concept forms the base premise of Tomie, the iconic horror manga series by renowned artist and author Junji Ito, which made its debut in 1987 and closed its narrative (for now) in 2000. Ito’s original idea goes like this: a teenage girl is caught cheating on her boyfriend with their class’s teacher. An argument ensues, resulting in her falling to her death. To protect their classmate from a murder charge, the entire class and their teacher concoct a plan to dismember the corpse and dispose of the pieces in random places. The pieces are found by police, and positively identified to belong to Tomie, but her killer remains unknown. The plan seems to have worked… until Tomie waltzes back into class, very much alive and in one piece, as if nothing ever happened. From then on, the lives of her classmates, teacher, and almost any man she encounters, will never be the same again.

Now, obviously we are here to discuss and review the film adaptation, not the manga; however, as a huge fan of the manga myself, I find it difficult to ignore the context of the manga entirely in favour of focusing on the film in a vacuum, and I couldn’t help but draw comparisons to their differences and allow my opinions of the film to be affected by them — especially seeing as I believe many of the film’s deviations to do the manga a disservice. More on that in a moment.

The plot of the film is the most obvious deviation, although the instigating event in the manga’s first chapter is still heavily referenced. The audience is introduced to Tsukiko, a photography student attending hypnotherapy sessions to recover memories lost from an apparent accident she was involved in three years ago. Meanwhile, a girl named Tomie Kawakami has recently been murdered, and the lead detective on the case believes Tsukiko is somehow involved; probably because this is the second time he has encountered the murder of a girl named Tomie Kawakami — the first time being three years ago, when Tsukiko had her ‘accident.’ In fact, there have apparently been many murdered teenage girls named Tomie Kawakami all throughout history, some dating back to the 1860s, and even further back then.

Here is where the film starts to lose me a little, and it is all down to interpretation and personal preference, but this is how I see it: in the very first chapter of the manga, Tomie is a regular teenage girl who gets caught up in a bit of scandalous school drama, and it ends up costing her her life — all because of a jealous boyfriend and a predatory teacher who had no business interacting with an underage student like that. The Tomie who returns to school afterwards — and every Tomie who makes an appearance in the manga henceforth — is not that same young girl whose biggest flaw was being bratty and attention-seeking. These incarnations are… something else. Something not entirely human. And this all began because a grown adult man and the children he meant to care for decided that the reputation of a male student mattered more than the life of a female one. This girl was, essentially, the first Tomie.

And then here is the film adaption, which appears to instead imply that there never was an ‘original’, or even human, Tomie in the first place — that she was always some kind of timeless eldritch being, sent here amongst humanity solely to torment those around her and die from doing so. This… kind of ruins the charm of the story for me. A huge part of why I love the Tomie manga is that I interpret it as an extremely dark satire on femicide; Tomie may be rude, mean, unpleasant, annoying, or downright utterly cruel, but at the end of the day… none of that ever justifies the brutal slaughter she is always inevitably faced with. Her killers’ (usually men) obsessively infatuated demeanours around her seem to be utterly out of her control, and when their sanity finally snaps due to her insufferable antics, she gets scared. She screams. She cries. She tries to run away. She begs to know why they are doing this to her. It turns out she wasn’t “asking for it” after all, and nothing she has done justifies the fear and pain she endures at the hands of those she has tormented, to be doomed to die over and over again in all kinds of horrific manners and come back just to die once more. No woman deserves such violence and rage from a man no matter what clothes she wears, or whether she is “polite” enough. It is always cold-blooded murder, and it is always tragic.

This is not the only aspect in which I feel as though the film adaptation has lost the soul of the manga. The other primary issue is both the story and the pacing; it is very, very, VERY slow. Since I am a fan of the manga and generally know what will happen in an adaptation, I managed to scrape up a little patience to continue watching and wait for something to happen after 45 minutes of runtime. 15 more minutes elapsed, then 30, and then finally the credits rolled and I was left feeling… bemused. Why did it take so long for the titular antagonist to make a full appearance when there was very little buildup for it in the first place? What was the purpose of not giving her any screen time in favour of building upon characters who still end up having very little screen presence or depth? Where were all the cool and crazy visuals and gore and effects the manga is so infamous for? I ask these questions as someone who is very familiar with and fond of the manga. If I were to view the film as someone going in completely blind with no clue of what was to come… I really don’t believe I would have had the patience to wait it out after more than the halfway mark. This film is not particularly friendly to manga fans, nor is it all that friendly to those unfamiliar with it — so I am unfortunately left wondering… who was this made for?

Honestly, it still could have worked. Waiting for Tomie to finally appear could have paid off, and this film could have gone down in history as one of those pieces of media where the most memorable performance has very little screentime, á la Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs. It could have become a cult masterpiece amongst fans of manga, or horror, or J-horror specifically… had they only hired a more fitting actress. I mean absolutely no disrespect to actress and J-pop icon Miho Kanno, who portrays the titular character, but she just doesn’t quite manage to hit that sweet spot of “adorably innocent yet unsettlingly seductive” that is absolutely essential to the character. I am inclined to believe it’s more of an issue with direction than anything else, as she is still evidently very talented, but sadly a film like this hinges entirely on getting that performance nothing short of perfect, and I’m none too happy to report that she doesn’t quite hit the mark on that front. (Do check some of her music out though, she really is very good)

There are some parts of this film I liked. I thought that the ridiculously over-the-top blood spraying effects, rare as they were, were kind of cool and pretty funny. I thought the ending was actually the most on-theme and appropriate aspect of the entire production, and the one thing it got absolutely right about the general theme and purpose of the manga. Oddly, though, I think what I’m going to remember the most about this film is the soundtrack. There’s this weird KK Slider-esque song that plays pretty frequently at rather out-of-place moments, and its dumpster fire overly dissonant sound weirdly evokes, for me, that I Feel Fantastic song/video that terrified us all on early YouTube. It makes next to no sense and things like that in a horror film just really get me giddy sometimes.

So, I can’t really recommend a film based purely on its ending being kind of interesting and its soundtrack reminding me of early internet trauma. But, I’m also not going to recommend that anyone doesn’t watch it, either. I feel that it’s productive viewing at least once, and if you still fancy giving it a try after this review, it is now available on limited edition Blu-ray with Arrow Films. And if you find it’s not quite up to standard, you can always read the manga… and then read it again. And again and again and again… because if there’s one guarantee in this world about Tomie, it’s that she’s not going away any time soon. Perhaps it would be wise to make the most of that for now.

Phoenix’s Archive – Tomie (1998)