In Keishi Kondo’s ‘mothopoeic’ feature debut New Religion (2022), a mysterious man named Oka (Satoshi Oka) somehow uses his photographic skills and entomological knowledge to capture people broken by loss and to piece them back together again as murderous terrorists. It is a strikingly enigmatic, oneiric horror film, part stylised ghost story, part urban apocalypse, where we are never sure if Oka’s subjects are being mesmerised and brainwashed into becoming killing machines, or if they undergo a strange metamorphosis in Oka’s developing room where they swap their bodies with moths eager for a taste of human mortality.
With its duration of 30 minutes, Kondo’s latest work Neu Mirrors is too long to be a mere short film, but too short to qualify as a feature – an ungainly proportion that chimes perfectly with its status as a misfit oddity. This is a companion piece and offshoot of New Religion, something which both words of its title in different ways imply (‘neu’ is just the German word for ‘new’, and ‘mirrors’ suggests reduplication). It is also upfront in advertising its connection to New Religion, both because it opens with a textual quote from Zhuangzi’s Butterfly Dream to nail down the preoccupation with lepidoptera, perspectival paradox and transformation that it shares with the feature film, and because its first scene involves the bespectacled driver Aizawa (Daiki Nunami), a peripheral character from New Religion, as he has a strange, red-tinged encounter in a large hotel suite with none other than Oka himself, and discovers a book containing black-and-white photos of a number of people who include himself and a mysterious woman.
The rest of Neu Mirrors will also take place in this setting, although the personnel will change. For the camera does a slow pan around the suite’s interior, and ends on that woman seen in the photo, but now in the room – and a man out of shot who at first we take to be Aizawa again because of the distinctive spectacles that he is extending in his hand, but once he enters the frame we see that he is in fact Joel (Bob Werley), a westerner and company executive, and that the glasses in fact belong to the woman, Mizuki (Saori). After more than a year serving loyally as Joel’s secretary, she has been inappropriately invited to his suite for a romantic dinner and maybe more – but in keeping with this film’s focus on fluid identity, Mizuki is in fact leading a double life, working undercover to steal the algorithm which her boss has been developing.
There are yet more layers to Mizuki. For as the drama in this suite unfolds, various characters will arrive and disappear as if in a dream, and they will all see Mizuki as a completely different person. For one (Natsumi Hirose) calls Mizuki by the male name ‘Toru’ and ‘Mr Designer’ and seems to be in a relationship with her/him, while another (Akira Inoue) addresses her as ‘Yuki’, yet another (Takahiro Iwata) as ‘Yuka’, and a fourth (Nenshô Mamizu) as ‘mum’, insisting that she has lived there with him since his childhood – even though this last is a man in his late middle ages, and clearly many years older than his addressee. Mizuki is evidently legion, and when the photography book reappears, it includes a different, now blurry picture of Mizuki’s face superimposed on various other faces, in what her greying ‘son’ likens to “a multiple-exposure portrait with thousands of people overlapping.”
When one of Mizuki’s visitors (the one who calls her ‘Toru’) describes how, in a design file on which she is working, she has mistakenly merged the different layers of a picture “so it has one layer now”, she might as well be talking about Mizuki, who is like a composite of the multiple guests who have stayed in this suite, as though they are all haunting the same space and possessing the same person. In the end, when the confused Mizuki retreats to the bathroom, and sees a long line of people reflected in the infinity mirror where only her image should be, Oka will return to explain to her cryptically that she and he are in a constructed reality, “become all of the souls who are stuck here floating.” Oka is once again the sinister master of ceremonies here, and whether he is breaking down Mizuki (or Aizawa)’s sense of identity and hypnotising him/her towards an extreme act (of, precisely, self-destruction), or he has actually sent her into “another reality”, it seems that she is now forever lost, not so much in terms of where she is – for that never changes – but rather of who and when. This is Mizuki’s long dark night of the soul, or psyche – a word which, in Ancient Greek, also means ‘butterfly’ – and the hotel suite is her chrysalis.
Using an electric blue colour scheme to replace the darkroom red that dominated New Religion (and that only recurs here when Oka appears), Neu Mirrors still retains the original’s love of inverted cityscapes, and a clinical, almost hyperreal slickness that both complements and conceals its surreal nature. For in its disorienting leaps from one scene to the next, in a place designed to accommodate people who come and go, check in and leave, this DID drama is as Protean as its protagonist, and as irrational as Oka. It is a paradoxical piece, offering plenty of room for reflection on the nature of image, imago and identity, of metamorphosis and metempsychosis, while the impression lingers – like a ghost – of increasing, incomprehensible dread if not outright existential panic.
strap: Keishi Kondo’s companion piece to his debut New Religion is an enigmatic, unnerving hotel-set labyrinth of multi-layered identities
© Anton Bitel
