TL;DR: A missing child story built around an old camcorder tape, a haunted mountain, and a slow-burn mystery that leans very much on mood than scares - worth a watch if you like patient horror that hints more than it shows.
A Story Built On Absence Rather Than Impact
A pretty simple setup and premise here - Keita's brother, Hinata, disappears during a game of hide-and-seek in a half-collapsed building out in the mountains of Gunma - and Keita, now grown up,splits his time between a supermarket job and mountain rescue work, still orbiting the same unanswered question for over a decade.
The film opens up that wound again when an old camcorder tape resurfaces after his father dies, and his mother sends it over, like it’s a family heirloom instead of something that clearly should’ve stayed buried in a drawer, so of course, Keita watches it.
The camcorder footage is easily the strongest part of the whole film, it's uncomfortably long actually, and nothing about it is too polished or structured, it’s just kids wandering around a forest and an abandoned building while saying and doing things that don’t fully make sense in hindsight.
Hinata talks about seeing “puyo-puyo” creatures, which sounds almost silly on paper, but also just wrong enough that you start paying closer attention to every empty corner of the frame, with the camera almost lingering on scenes where nothing is happening on purpose, like it is making sure you're still watching.
Watching Keita watch this tape is almost more interesting than the tape itself too, as he just sits there like he’s trying not to fall apart in front of his roommate Tsukasa, who has psychic sensitivity and immediately clocks that something about the recording doesn’t sit right.
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Following The Past Back Into The Present
Keita decides to head back to the mountain with Tsukasa, and a reporter named Mikoto tags along, digging into local history, and this is where the film starts leaning heavily into the let’s walk through quiet places and hope something reveals itself approach - forest paths, abandoned structures, long stretches where characters just look around and talk in low voices about things that may or may not matter.
Mikoto adds a slightly different energy to it all, more practical, but even she ends up folding into the same slow rhythm as everyone else, where nobody really drives the story forward in a strong way, it just sort of drifts from one location to another, like it’s following a memory instead of a map.
We get some hints of supernatural stuff scattered throughout the film - brief shapes in the background, strange movements in corners of buildings, moments where something clearly isn’t normal but also doesn’t stick around long enough to become clear, and that’s the pattern here.
Everything is suggested, almost never confirmed in a satisfying way, and it also borrows ideas from well-known Japanese horror, cursed recordings, haunted locations, things passing through old technology, but never pushes any of it far enough to turn into something memorable on its own.
There’s even a twist involving a more direct ghost-like presence, but it lands more like a checkbox being ticked than a real escalation, and I could see it coming early, which didn’t help, and when it finally shows up, it doesn’t really change the tone or raise the stakes.
At some point though, I did start to suspect the film is actively avoiding anything too direct, with no sudden scares, no big visual shocks, no moments where everything snaps into place, so if that was the intention, fair enough, but it does leave some scenes hanging, and not in a good way.
The cast handle the material better than the script probably deserves though, and Keita especially stays restrained, which works for a character who’s clearly been carrying this for years without really talking about it.
The tone is also pretty steady throughout, but also a bit stubborn, as it commits hard to being slow and quiet, with stretches where nothing meaningful happens, which I think will test peoples patience.
Final Thoughts
This is a film that clearly prefers atmosphere over payoff, and a film that barely pushes past suggestion, which won’t work for everyone, but I don't these kind of films, with the power of suggestion rather than anything in your face, even if it is a bit frustrating as well - not 'scary' in any sense, and not especially surprising, but somewhat interesting in the way it lets silence and do most of the work, if that's your thing.