I went in expecting straight-ahead horror. What I got was a true exemplar of the “cinema of the fantastic.”

Somehow spare and voluptuous at the same time, LONG DREAM is a nifty little hypnagogic field trip into genre territory that seems rarely explored these days: that place where horror and dark fantasy and even science-fiction merge, to be sure, but also a place that doesn’t really care what genre it is. Of course to a degree the same thing can be said about Higuchinsky’s UZUMAKI (2000), but where that film was radically centrifugal in its energies, with LONG DREAM he keeps things as modest and as tightly focused, and yet as allegorically suggestive, as a Borges story. Think of the central spiral motif in UZUMAKI; there the one-name director was concerned about the cosmically expanding outer tail whereas here we go inwards to that ever-diminishing and enigmatic center.

Such preoccupations in terms of theme and philosophy are in perfect synch with the manifest storyline. Just when it seems that genre filmmaking is running out of ways to tackle the rich but over-mined world of dreams and dreaming (cf. THE DEATHS OF IAN STONE, 2007), here comes LONG DREAM with a premise that is Kafka-like in its simplicity and power. Based on a manga by Junji Ito, LONG DREAM exploits the difference between real-time and dream-time to the hilt: a hospital patient feels that he disappears into his dreams for years at a time even though only a single night passes in our frame of reference. Eventually there are psychological—and physical—consequences to these excursions, and that’s where the evocative creepiness starts to take hold.

Yet rather than use mindscreen and other forms of subjectivity to help us experience these dreams, Higuchinsky exercises restraint and limits us to hearing about them or, more harrowingly, seeing the changes they wreak on the dreamer. At first these self-reported dreams are of the monstrously mundane variety: the patient regresses to his student days and must cram-and-exam without respite. But then we move into what are clearly more fantastical—and ineffable—realms, as LONG DREAM eventually creates an implicit, Lovecraftian sense of things that not only can’t be described, but also probably shouldn’t be described. The authorial tone, too, is very much Lovecraft or even Victorian/Edwardian in nature: “Here is a dreadful little tale we feel compelled to share with you—we don’t fully understand it either and it’s perhaps best if we all forgot about it as soon as possible. Except that it’s exceedingly difficult to do so.”

In filmic, as opposed to literary, terms, the analogy that comes to mind is Kiyoshi Kurosawa helming an episode from the old TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE TV series, whose eeriness, for me, stemmed largely from its bare bones production values.

LONG DREAM, also produced for television, sports a digital look that will trouble those looking for the sumptuous colors of UZUMAKI (although LONG DREAM still boasts several striking images) and certainly many filmgoers look down upon the format in principle. After all, how can you really have a “fantastic film” that reproduces reality with such low fidelity? Isn’t the point to transport audiences across the threshold of our world and into another by using persuasive strategies that rely on photographic techniques and visual effects—that is, to avoid “the fake” at all costs?

There are points worth considering in such arguments, but the danger is in discarding entire traditions (e.g., Expressionism) that reach imaginative heights without adherence to such codes. I’d also maintain that a low-res approach is best employed in genre films where it not just happens to fit the setting and themes but actually enhances them. Clearly the hospital environment in LONG DREAM is not the one recognizable from standard J-horror, which takes the vast and lonely vistas of everyday institutions and transfigures them into stark landscapes of dread. In other words, Higuchinsky’s emphasis isn’t on the inherently otherworldly properties of fluorescent lighting and inhumanly white-on-white color schemes. Instead, he backlights LONG DREAM’s more intimate, almost familial, scenes of horror with a hideous green glow that seeps in from unknown sources and practically pulses at us. Here a high-res capture would arguably render such touches realistic and therefore, paradoxically, less realistic as our attention would be drawn to questions of verisimilitude we might otherwise ignore.

But I don’t want to create the impression that Higuchinsky has sat on his hands stylistically and delivered a subtle work of “quiet horror”—the first half of LONG DREAM in particular is full of visual flights of fancy (well, brief “sorties” might be a better term) and his storytelling throughout is bold and, often literally, in-your-face. The only letdown, in terms of both narrative and imagery, comes near the end of LONG DREAM, when the plot starts to resemble that of a more conventional mystery, complete with scheming madman. For some, this slight shift will supply much-needed familiarity and closure, but for me it was a signal that it was time to wake up from this dream, much as I hated to.

At a running time of about an hour, LONG DREAM moves briskly and doesn’t overstay its welcome. On this DVD release, its brevity is mitigated by the generous extras, which include an interview with Junji Ito. All in all, a very nice release from the new label Bone House Asia. With that name, I expected titles capitalizing on gore-chic, but not so. Instead, it looks like these guys are going to be releasing fall-through-the-cracks gems—titles that will never be remade in Hollywood, or ones that come from countries whose output in underrepresented on Region 1 DVD. As an example, I’m already looking forward to VISITS: HUNGRY GHOST ANTHOLOGY, a Malaysian film with an October street date.