• Wide Release
• Director: Ataru Oikawa
• Written by: Ataru Oikawa, Kei Oishi, Takamasa Sato
• Running Time: 94 minutes
• Language: Japanese
• MPAA Rating: R - Restricted
• Cast: Noriko Nakagoshi, Arata Furuta, Eriko Hatsune, Yuka Itaya, Naoko Otani, Aki Fukada, Toshinobu Matsuo

From Ataru Oikawa, the man who gave us the awesome “Tomie”, comes this shot-on-digital addendum to the long-black haired, female, Japanese ghost film - a genre that seemingly played itself out around the moment Sarah “Buffy” Gellar hopped on a plane to Toho Studios. For the record, I’m not going to totally trash “Apartment 1303” because, well, for about the first hour, I was scared shitless. Oikawa might be treading long trampled cinematic ground but he does have a knack for building suspense -- for turning darkened closets or half pried doorways into something completely and utterly terrifying -- if only for 60 or so minutes. I’ll take that over half of the horror crap I’ve been bombarded with of late.

“Apartment 1303” opens midway into what turns out to be yet another tragic suicide occurring in, yup, apartment 1303. A young girls sits unpacking and is suddenly taken with fear when she hears a noise coming from the bedroom of the empty flat. As she goes to investigate, things jump forward into the absolute bizarre as she is next seen dangling from her top floor balcony, eventually crashing down onto the tarmac right beside the building’s exquisite looking pool. Jump forward again a month and another young woman, Sayaka, is celebrating the sudden freedom of her new apartment -- 1303. As she parties with her friends, she speaks of how pretty the ocean view is from the balcony, and of how she got the place at a really insane discount. Well, it doesn‘t take long for the reasons for a markdown become apparent. Probing a noise in the bedroom, seemingly coming from a closet, Sayaka soon emerges in a zombie-like state. As her friends pause in shock, Sayaka drops to her knees and proceeds to chomp down her dog’s Kibbles and Bits. Moments later, she blathers about something incoherent and hastily tosses herself from the balcony to her death. Like the girl one month before, Sayaka has become yet another statistic of the apartment/death trap. As it turns out, she’s the fifth girl to commit suicide in so many years.

By accident, Sayaka's big sister, Mariko (Noriko Nakagoshi), who is quietly wrestling with the jealously she felt towards her popular, successful sister, chances on some strange things while cleaning up the half-unpacked belongings, including her sibling’s teddy bear which has seemingly been acquired by a little girl living in 1302. As she lands upon the sudden revelation of the apartment’s death count, this leads Mariko to begin investigating (sorta) the history of the building, including looking into a previous tenant named Yukiyo who murdered her mother and left her corpse to rot in the closet for six months, before eventually swan diving from the top floor herself. A popular paranormal mythology has sprouted up around the apartment, fostering a number of ‘haunted’ books about the place. Of course, none of the tenants, including Mariko’s sister, had ever heard of the ghost of apartment 1303. Interestingly, as Mariko combs through the back-story of Yukiyo and the abuse she suffered at the hands of her malicious, drunken mother, she begins to draw odd parallels with that of her own relationship with her cruel, spiteful mother.

Yukiyo, in some horribly-applied make-up, eventually arrives to muck up the last half hour of the film, inexplicably shooting off yards of nappy black hair at a trio of youngsters who were unlucky enough to have rented the apartment for the summer. Oops. WTF? Er… Triple ker schmuck! Mariko arrives just in the nick of time to do, well, nothing. Her attempts to appease the ghost in an over-blown Tony Scott smoke-machine of a climax blows up in her face as Yukiyo’s own jealous tendencies arrive as an ironic gobsmack, tossing Mariko for a ride in a somewhat loopy, ambiguous ending.

Forcing lots more questions than it answers, “Apartment 1303” is problematic in its ability to tell a workable story. It parks a lot of superfluous shit on the narrative namely a caustic mother and daughter pair, analogous to the two other mom/daughter duos in the film, living in the next apartment. Is the mom and daughter actually Yukiyo and her mother a decade before they went all batshit? Who knows? The film isn’t providing any answers. Also, characters come and go without coherent explanation. Watch for the film’s closing moments where Mariko’s distraught mother pops up at the apartment, only to depart the room (and the film) without so much as a goodbye… or a reason. Also, Yukiyo’s mom seems to lose her mind -- but why? It’s never sufficiently explained why she lost it -- only that she did. One minute she’s happily re-arranging Yukiyo’s face for no good reason and the next minute she’s determinedly writing 'Die Die Die' on her apartment wall like a delinquent grade school student chalking up a black board. These are but a dozen problems that throttle the film. The usage of cheap green-screen effects only work to take us out of the film and remind us that we’re watching a cheap-”Ju On” knock-off.

Twenty-eight year old Noriko Nakagoshi plays Mariko as rather bland and lifeless, although a sexy bland and lifeless. Her spotty range of emotions seem to arrive at inappropriate times throughout the film. Granted, her anxiety ridden scenes with her mom do offer her character some depth, its those scenes where she weeps over her sister that feel phony and ultimately reek of cliché. Noriko Nakagoshi is a beautiful woman, and thankfully so, as Ataru Oikawa and his cinematographer Tokusho Kikumura are seemingly in love with her. Lengthy scenes play out with Nakagoshi ‘s face framed as she sits staring off into space, smoking a cigarette and doing not a heck of a lot.

As I said, the first half is much more frightening than the last, as if the director and his trio of writers simply ran out of gas. The conclusion is shockingly flat, over-the-top and illogical -- and strangely reminiscent of “Poltergeist”. For me, the scene where a bloody Sayaka wanders into the room and stares down her sister had me freaked, and yeah, that‘s in the first hour. I’d suggest watching the film for that scene alone.