A slit-faced woman (2007)

http://asianwiki.com/Carved
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuchisake-onna

A Child's Nightmare:

Carved Flesh Deep

The film is based on a legend in Japan and like most Japanese ghost stories everything is not what it seems. The narrative starts with children telling the urban myth among each other and there is a feeling of suspension around the town but it is revealed that everyone in the town has there own personal issues and this is the cause of all their problems. All of the adult are as bad as the slit-faced woman  if not worst because the slit-faced woman is a supernatural being and the adult are just as abusive. The only characters that have any sense of the children but the only problem is that even the adult that are not abusive can be possesses by the slit-faced woman.

When i first heard about this film, i thought it was going to based like a murder mystery  but instead it is just a Japanese horror genre which the slit-faced woman appears as a zombie at the beginning ??? The slit-faced woman is a vengeful spirit that has come back to kill children or make people look like her. The thing being is that the slit-faced woman never asked any of the characters if she was pretty and just killed randomly. I mean yes, she mainly killed children but there where not really any explanations to why.  In the legend the child's fate was in consequence to how they answered her question,  the special effects where good, the make up artists must be working overtime on the slit-faced woman and they have gone to great detail to explain that the slit-faced woman is immortal.

All of the women that the  slit-faced woman posses are abusive so it is almost like she is reflecting herself into them and it is a disease that is passes on from person to person so it is no surprise that she returns even at the end. the night scene when they enter the house of the slit-faced woman it has an Aura of Ringu or Grundge because it is something like a ghost story or a zombie movie. It was no surprise that the slit-faced woman came back in the end simply because she is a vengeful spirit but i was surprised how easily she was found. All of these events can be only be explained as being supernatural because it is a very complicated concept and the man who was the son of the slit-face woman is filled with guilt. the audience is forced to question the reality of the film, it is like Inception in a way, is there really a slit-faced woman or is it peoples minds playing tricks on them? is the film a look in to the human mind? are the characters connected to the myth and avoiding their own personal demons?

The film is clever because in other films there is a distinction between victim and killer but there was no real distinction. There is no real division between good and evil but there is allot of suggestions of mental health or the human body being out of control. There are mental health issues that woman have where the have no emotional attachment to there children, Japan don't have any limitation to subject matters and this is similar to Suicide club where the look deeply into the subject of suicidal teenagers of Japan.  The concept of children being mutilated is one which not many people can relate to but the director is trying to use the main objective of the  Myth and tell the story in a way that people can understand.