15/06/2023 - Saku Sakamoto’s sophomore creature feature expands on its predecessor and triggers some legitimate fears, until it just bugs you

If David Cronenberg and John Carpenter had a premature demon baby and raised it by second-hand anime values, it might look a lot like this. But somehow, Feast of Amrita doesn’t even come close to that hypothetical image. Saku Sakamoto’s follow-up to his debut film Aragne: Sign of Vermillion features all of the contorted and violated bodies, but none of the thrills and smarts, which is worrying for a genre effort that leans heavily on a garish premise of infernal bug creatures taking possession of three high-school girls.

In its abrasive approach to supernatural body horror, Feast of Amrita forgets what made so many great horror stories – like Zulawski’s Possession or Carpenter’s The Thing – such physically and psychologically frightening experiences. For all the deformed torsos and monstrous entities in these classics, it is the crumbling morality, the paranoia towards the other and the self, and the restraint in showing the true nature of the beast that truly terrifies. Sakamoto, also a disciple of Ghost in the Shell director Mamori Oshii and winner of the Satoshi Kon award for his first film, is still far away from eliciting the same disconcerting feelings as his many inspirations.

Horror is big in Japan. Anime is big in Japan. Putting the two together, anime horror is commonplace, although often pushed to the peripheries of an industry dominated by fantasy fare and quirky teenage love stories. Throwing back to the sleazy style of OVAs (original video animations) from the 1980s – a decade which saw the resurgence of the grotesque in underground anime – Sakamoto embarked on a solo journey in 2018 with Aragne: Sign of Vermillion, an intriguing albeit confusing giallo-inspired slasher. That film resurrected an inventive DIY spirit, and perhaps it had to, given the shoestring budget that director-writer-producer-animator-composer Sakamoto was working with. An obvious passion project, it appealed to genre fans by acknowledging its inherent silliness while still honouring Japan’s legacy in psychological horror. Whatever its other shortcomings, Aragne understood that building atmosphere is key before you let the monsters crawl out from under the bed.

It's logical, then, that Sakamoto would be keen on returning to the demonic universe he had created. However, the second time around, even the semi-coherent thrills of Aragne are absent, as the director gets himself tangled up in his own gargantuan web. Announced as a prequel to Aragne, Feast of Amrita introduces us to Tamahi, Yu and Aki, three innocent high school girls who are first seen chitchatting on their way home through the outskirts of the city, in the looming shadow of the same dilapidated apartment block featured in Aragne. The trio witness someone falling from the rooftop and hurry to the entrance. A ghastly figure appears. Tamahi encounters a humongous bug. The girls, it seems, are to be little more than victims: the malignant critters need their human bodies and souls to escape the building and return to their own dimension. It’s here that – as a writer – Sakamoto fails his characters, choosing to fetishize the prototypical anime girls as the literal possession of his monsters, but also of his own male fantasies.

Balancing visions, flashbacks, reality and fantasy, Sakamoto’s sophomore film takes on quite a lot and might seem ambitious at first. But for all its narrative and bodily twists, it can’t disguise the fact that it is made up of the simplest and most straightforward of horror-movie signifiers. Continuing with an amateurish aesthetic that favours low frame rates, shaky camera movements and unpolished character designs, Feast of Amrita relinquishes most of its predecessor’s more audaciously gonzo qualities. Gone is the Silent Hill-like exploration of the tenement; gone is the moody and hallucinatory scenery; gone even is the charm of a fragmented narrative. Instead of a self-aware creature feature, Sakamoto delivers a heavy-handed trial-and-(t)error time-loop mindbender, without much mind to bend.