Also known as 'The Stranger from Afar', this Japanese horror film focuses on a freelance photographer who rescues a naked woman chained to a rock in a subway tunnel; he takes her home, only to discover that she is more animalistic than human with a taste for blood. The film is pretty much as weird as it sounds with little indication of just how much of what occurs is hallucination, imaginary or real. It remains a gripping ride though even when everything cannot be deciphered thanks to a truckload of atmosphere and a genuinely unsettling turn by Tomomi Miyashita as the mysterious woman. Some of the symbolism hits home quite well too with the protagonist viewing himself as a vampire, feeding off filming the misery and pain of others (sort of like Jake Gyllenhaal's character in 'Nightcrawler', but with a moral compass here). The film also taps into some curious territory early on as the protagonist announces a desire to find what caused a man to be so terrified that he committed suicide before his camera lens; some of his soliloquies in this early part of the film bring to mind 'Videodrome' as he equates cameras to the retinas of human eyes. One's mileage with 'Marebito' will no doubt vary depending on one's tolerance for the unexplained and deliberate ambiguity, but it is certainly refreshingly different from most other vampire movies out there.
