Available to rent Friday through Monday at jccc.on.ca. Either way, watch it with as few distractions as possible – or you’ll have no idea whether someone is coming or going. (Assuming “real time” is even applicable to this sort of narrative in the first place, of course.) You can enjoy the film for its fractal plotting, as Kato and his friends get lost in a comic fugue of causes and effects, or you can just sit back and enjoy the fluid grace of Yamaguchi’s high-wire cinematography, which remains calm while the characters grow increasingly panicked.
Naturally, this leads to some truly ridiculous complications, all of which play out in real time in a single unbroken take.
The premise is simple: through a quirk of webcam metaphysics, cafe owner Kato (Kazunori Tosa) can see precisely two minutes into the future – but only from the fixed position of the monitor in his cafe, and only when he runs upstairs to see the feed on his computer. If you enjoyed the fizzy One Cut Of The Dead but wished it had more self-reflexive time-travel shenanigans, Yamaguchi’s ingenious lo-fi paradox comedy is here for you. Juggling clips from over 100 films, interviews with dozens of critics and filmmakers and animated sequences from none other than Guy Maddin – a filmmaker who delights in creating his own ancient rites and forgotten lore – Woodlands Dark And Days Bewitched digs deep into British and American horror to explore the threads that run between the two nations, occasionally reaching out into the larger world to see what else might connect. Those three films reverberate through the decades, leaving their shadows on modern works like Robert Eggers’s The Witch and Ari Aster’s Hereditary and Midsommar.
What is folk horror cinema, exactly? Janisse argues the genre truly came into its own with a trilogy of British chillers in the late 60s and early 70s: Witchfinder General, The Blood On Satan’s Claw and The Wicker Man, in which directors Michael Reeves, Piers Haggard and Robin Hardy tapped into a collective anxiety about the speed of progress, echoing and amplifying one another’s implications that the natural world wouldn’t be left behind so easily. Woodlands Dark And Days Bewitched: A History Of Folk Horror
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