“So what’s with all this mystery about the temple?” That clumsy question, asked by an American tourist to a blind, elderly Japanese man who is said to have once returned from the sinister mountain shrine holding his own eyeballs in his hands, sums up the dearth of suspense we’re dealing with in the languid horror cheapie Temple. The directorial debut of established cinematographer Michael Barrett, Temple makes little effort to transcend threadbare scary movie clichés while trotting out listless J-horror tropes that rely far more on the film’s seemingly exotic locale for some sort of inherent profundity rather than anything found in the cookie-cutter script.
Temple frames its primary story as a flashback to seemingly unspeakable events, which are being pieced together by the authorities from found video footage and the interrogation of a mutilated hospital patient sheathed in a protective plastic bubble. Unfortunately, despite hinting at a vague supernatural undercurrent and returning to images of eyeless old people and creepy children, much of the film is simply bland, love-triangle melodrama.
When religious studies student Kate (Natalia Warner) gets the idea to put together a book about Japanese temples and shrines, she brings along both her childhood best friend, Chris (Logan Huffman), who speaks some Japanese, and her douchey, unfaithful boyfriend, James (Brandon Sklenar). The two Calvin Klein modelesque men have never met before, and jealousy ensues. After long stretches of bumming around Japanese bars and bookstores, stumbling around in the woods and photographing some broken statues, the trio finally encounters the monsters in the film’s third act. But by then, it’s difficult to care whether any of these three shallow characters lives or dies, and the film’s underlying mystery about the identity of the mutilated figure in the wheelchair is rendered moot—a forced, unimaginative final twist notwithstanding.
For a film that adopts the trappings of J-horror, it’s disappointing that the paranormal and folkloric elements are given such short shrift. The trio of doomed, white tourists gallivanting around Japan’s sacred spaces only finds out about this particular haunted temple by happening across a handwritten text about it in an antique bookstore whose proprietor, naturally, declares the book not for sale. In a bar, a Japanese businessman acts as a harbinger by telling Chris the temple is “very unlucky” and he should not go there. But there’s no genuine buildup of suspense, and when the supernatural elements finally do manifest, they feel like a heavy-handed insertion rather than a natural progression toward a sinister end.
Above all, Temple’s greatest sin is simply being boring. Black-eyed children, monstrous statues that come alive, haunted shrines in the woods – these are elements that should at least be lurid or campy. It’s unforgiveable to make them dull, especially when so much of the film instead fixates on sappy melodrama from characters so shallow they’re just begging to get eviscerated. The best that can be said for Temple is that it’s such a slight film it won’t linger long in your memory.
The post Temple appeared first on Spectrum Culture.