Home | Movies By Year | Movies from 2001
Tomie: Re-birth
Buy Tomie: Re-birth now from AmazonFirst, read the Wikipedia article. Then, scroll down to see what other TopShelfReviews readers thought about the movie. And once you've experienced the movie, tell everyone what you thought about it.
Wikipedia article
is a 2001 Japanese horror film directed by Takashi Shimizu as the third installment of the 'Tomie' film series, based on a manga of the same name by Junji Ito. The film was released in Japan on March 24, 2001, and screened at the Manila Eiga Sai (Japanese Film Festival) in Philippines on September 3, 2005.
Plot
An artist named Hideo is painting his girlfriend Tomie (Miki Sakai), but she dismisses it as a poor painting and he kills her in a jealous rage with an art knife. He gets his friends Shunsuke and Takumi to help him bury her. Later on, the three friends go to a party but see Tomie there; Hideo kills himself out of shock. Tomie latches onto Shunsuke only for his mother to kill her and they cut her up together in an unnatural ecstasy. They then burn her head, which has already started to regenerate and has some crude limbs for locomotion. The portrait of Tomie allows for her regeneration, as her supernatural blood mixed with the pigments. Takumi's girlfriend Hitomi gets possessed by Tomie, in a rather viral fashion. In a fit of jealousy, the two Tomies try to eliminate the other.
Hitomi, however, is still awake despite being controlled mostly by Tomie. She doesn't want to become a monster, and so she decides to commit suicide. However, when at a waterfall, about to commit suicide, Tomie's head grows on the side of Hitomi's neck next to her head. They all die and then Takumi's sister comes and throws flowers into the water. A small facial mole can be seen directly beneath the sister's left eye, suggesting that, because Takumi gave her the portrait of Tomie, she was also possessed by her. Thus, the sister is the newest Tomie.
Cast
Reception
Blogcritics made note of the film's slow pace, quiet sets, and lack of gore, and wrote that there even with its high body count, there appeared to be "a conscious effort to keep to decorum in the traditional sense of the word, which means to say even during a dismemberment there is still little to show for it except an artfully expanding pool of blood and Tomies severed head watching from a bowl." In admitting he lacked the cultural references, The reviewer felt that a viewer would "probably need to be a fan of the manga and the previous movies to get anything from this." He wrote he appreciated the slow pace of a creeping horror film having the ability to give him "the heebie-jeebies", but that the pacing in this film seemed pointless, the representation of a "pixie-cute girl with the tittering laugh" was annoying, and he did not understand the interactions between the players.
The horror reviewing website '10,000 Bullets' made note of the various 'Tomie' films using different actresses for the character of Tomie, but that only the villain's name was consistent in each of them. They appreciated that director Shimizu was able to inject his personal style "without ever losing sight of the character's roots." They noted that while 'Re-Birth' is "more disgusting than scary", the cast performances are the best in the series so far, making special note of Miki Sakai's performance as Tomie and how her "unnerving laugh and haunting her eyes tell so much more than any dialog could." The noted that some of the imagery from 'Replay' was brought over into 'Re-Birth', and that the film "starts off strong before metamorphosing into something that is so strange it almost parodies itself".
Release
'Tomie: Re-birth' was released in Japan on March 24, 2001.
The film was released on DVD in an anamorphic widescreen format by Ventura in May 2004. DVD extras include trailers for films in the Tomie series, as well as interviews with the director and cast.
References
References
*
*
Buy Tomie: Re-birth now from Amazon
<-- Return to movies from 2001