Long Dream (2000)

 

Director: Higuchinsky

Screenplay: Higuchinsky and Kyoichi Nanatsuki

Based on the short manga by Junji Ito

Cast: Kenjirô Tsuda as Doctor Yamauchi; Tsugumi as Takeshima Mami; Eriko Hatsune as Kana Sakurai; Masami Horiuchi as Kuroda; Shûji Kashiwabara as Mukoda Tetsurou

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Shows)

 

Once I searched for a restroom for eight years. It was agony.

Adapting Junji Ito, a seventeen year old girl with a benign tumour named Mami (Tsugumi) is in hospital, a person in a constant state of panic fearing her impending death. To review this adaptation of Long Dream, an obscure title from Higuchinsky, the Ukraine born Japanese director who adapted Uzumaki for a 2000 film, I will have to spoil the source manga as this elaborates beyond the whole story into its own narrative, starting with that she is terrified by another patient who is physically changed and evokes the Grim Reaper to her. This male patient named Tetsurou (Shûji Kashiwabara), who is being treated by an older male doctor, was afraid of sleeping, suffering from "Long Dreams", lucid ones that can feel two days long and full of nightmares, increasing in their length of time to months and centuries.

They are strange dreams of being a soldier, forced to eat his own feet, or cramming for an exam for a year and a half. The longer dreams however, as they continue, lead to full body mutation, a transcendental transformation into an almost alien entity. Where Long Dream the film changes, actually from the source, is that its halfway point is the final twist of the manga. That, when Tetsurou passes his body into the endless dream, it dissolves to dust and leaves a substance which may be responsible for the dreams, leading to medical malpractice as, with memories of a young woman in his life, another patient with a benign tumour named Kana (Eriko Hatsune), the older doctor "treats" Mani by injecting her with this substance, starting her into having long dreams.  

The work, only under an hour and premiered as a TV movie for TV Asahi, feels like a segment from a live action Junji Ito television anthology we never got, which includes its aesthetic touches. For those unaware of Ito, starting as a comic book author in the late eighties, he became a legendary figure in his homeland for horror comics, to the point of even adapting Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Osamu Dazai's No Longer Human into his own takes, whilst taking into the 2010s to be a figure we fully embraced in the West, becoming his own man in the world of graphic novels and Japanese manga as a result, admired as he is as much a meme too. In terms of trying to adapt his work though, there is not as much as you would think, Long Dream one of the first. Most of it is stripped down drama, in a muted looking hospital environment, barring that Tetsurou when he is transformed brings in a monster from a b-movie, trying to replicate in its own virtues the idiosyncrasies of Junji Ito's work. Ito's has been incredibly difficult to recreate as, not only has he access to unbridled imagination with his talents, but because one of Ito's more difficult to depict trademarks is fine detail, in the designs of the horrific sights but even the faces of characters in terror or menace. This evokes Uzumaki, Higuchinsky's more well known adaptation, which had to openly embrace its obvious CGI, in accepting how ridiculous its more macabre content looks. Ito embraces the ridiculous as he does legitimately horrifying content - as Uzumaki has spirals the source of terror and people turning into snail people - but his craft is a nightmare to adapt even in animation well, and especially for live action even with prosthetics effects. Long Dream was a tale you could, barring some creepy monster makeup, make in limitations.

Where Long Dream though fumbles, even if of note, are Higuchinsky and co-writer Kyoichi Nanatsuki's inclusions after the original story ends. It becomes about the older doctor, as Mami has dreams which cause her, when awake, to kill someone and fall into a realm between dreams, all whilst he is fixated on trying to reach Kana, the deceased woman he loved, in the endless dreams. It leads to the obvious cliché in the end that he finds himself in a dream where he does not know where he is awake or not, which for some will be an immediate cop-out. The film has a gleefully pulpy tone, where it undercuts the dramatic monologue of not being able to get into the world of dreams by bashing someone's head in, but this ending will be full cheese, certainly being an unnecessary touch when, actually, the premise of stretching the source's final twist works enough by itself. That of medical malpractice is fascinating, when it should lead, with the doctor experimenting on himself, to his downfall as much as Mani's transformation being a clear signpost to happen. Long Dream, which is an obscure work which is difficult to see, is slight, another curious, worth a rediscovery now Junji Ito is a huge figure nowadays in the West as much as in Japan, but that ending will frustrate some.