Mononoke the Movie: The Phantom in the Rain

A medicine seller with no name enters the Ooku, the women's quarters of the shogun's palace. Two women have newly arrived and the rules of the place are severe. Before a child is born something happens: water gathers in the corridors, nobody remembers, and a mononoke, a spirit of resentment, appears. The medicine seller can only draw his sword once he knows three things: the spirit's form, its truth and its reason. Kenji Nakamura directs. This is the first of a three film series following the 2007 Mononoke television show. The visual language is unusual even for cinema. The backgrounds are built from the Japanese woodblock tradition and the texture of washi paper; the colours are saturated, the patterns are in constant motion, and the space has no perspective. The screen often looks like a painting. The subject at the centre is institutional. The Ooku is a structure in which women are enclosed to serve the shogun, and the spirit's origin lies in what happened there and was never recorded. The horror comes not from the supernatural but from the rules themselves. The voice cast changed for the new version, which drew a reaction from viewers of the original series. Who it is for: viewers who like formally ambitious anime and Japanese ghost narrative. Who it is not for: the story is closed and deliberately slow, and the film does not end on its own but runs into the rest of the trilogy.