Japanese filmmaker Takeshi Kushida, completely unknown to me, presented himself with a bizarre surrealistic and avant-garde drama/fantasy rather than classic horror. He himself characterized “Woman of the Photographs” as a horror romance, which for some may lead to an association with the cult “Audition” by Takashi Miike, but this was still significantly weaker. Kai is an old photographer, a sixty-year-old guy, for whom it is clear from the first glance that he is not only a loner, but also a real weirdo. And while photography used to be a medium used to immortalize a moment as it really is, modern technology has led to the fact that photography can often completely deceive.
Likewise, in the opening scene, a woman comes to Kai’s shop who wants a photo for some kind of dating site, but when Kai makes it, she is not satisfied and asks to “fix” it in Photoshop. This retouching will soon take on grotesque proportions, as Kai will change and beautify the woman’s photo beyond recognition, and the key moment of the film will occur when he meets another woman. Kyoko is a young influencer popular on social networks, and he will meet her in the forest while filming some kind of insects. During this time, Kyoko will do some extreme photoshoot, fall from a tree and injure herself, and when she realizes how well Kai can fix photos, she will simply move into his house.
A rather bizarre symbiosis will soon develop between them, and this is one of those rather abstract, almost non-narrative art-films full of symbolism. There is also a lot of symbolism in the fact that Kai’s pet is a praying mantis, an insect known for the female to eat the male after mating. The film was shot with a lot of style, and Kushida presented himself as another in a line of young Japanese filmmakers with avant-garde tendencies. However, “Woman of the Photographs” was a bit too strange for my taste, and the story, which is only marginally body horror, still remained somewhat sketchy and undeveloped.