SUFF 2025 – Where Cult Cinema, Transgression, and Innovation Collide
In the annals of Japanese horror cinema, Yoshihiro Nishimura occupies a singular, slippery niche — one forged in latex, arterial spray, and an irreverent carnival of grotesquery. From Tokyo Gore Police to Helldriver, his films have thrived on excess, turning the body into a site of anarchic spectacle. With Tokyo Evil Hotel, Nishimura returns to his splatter roots but cloaks the viscera in something more spectral, an unnerving meditation on urban legends and the hidden machinery of Japan’s entertainment underworld.
The premise sounds almost folkloric: a cursed hotel, five suicides in a year, a ghostly figure in a wheelchair propelled by betrayal and heartbreak. But Nishimura, ever the provocateur, is less interested in quiet ghost story chills than in conjuring a fever dream. The film drags the viewer down its neon-lit corridors, where reality and nightmare blur into one another. Images arrive in waves — some baroque in their grotesquerie, others achingly poetic — before dissolving into the next eruption of slime, latex, or digital delirium.
What anchors this onslaught is not narrative cohesion (which Nishimura deliberately unravels) but mood, texture, and metaphor. The hotel itself becomes a nexus of exploitation, its walls absorbing the residue of despair from a culture that glamorises seduction while feeding on vulnerability. Nishimura weaponises the tropes of J-horror — the wrathful woman, the haunted threshold, the cyclical nature of trauma — and splices them into his splatter lineage. If Ring and Ju-On explored the horror of technological contamination, Tokyo Evil Hotel maps the horror of commodified intimacy, where every smile has a price and every fantasy its corroded underbelly.
The cast — Masanori Mimoto and Natsumi Tadano among them — give just enough grounding to keep the delirium tethered to human suffering, though their characters often feel like archetypal vessels swept along by the director’s vision. The real star, as always with Nishimura, is the texture: prosthetic ingenuity, practical gore, and uncanny tableaux that feel equal parts Kabuki and Cronenberg.
Yet the film is not without fracture. The disjointedness — the lurch from social critique to grotesque comedy to lyrical melancholy — sometimes undermines the impact. For some, this instability will feel frustrating; for others, it is precisely Nishimura’s method, a refusal to let the viewer rest. In the context of the Sydney Underground Film Festival, however, Tokyo Evil Hotel feels entirely at home. SUFF thrives on works that assault the senses, destabilise the familiar, and revel in the unruly. Nishimura’s latest is all of that: a cacophony of horror tropes remixed, a lurid nightmare of betrayal and exploitation, and a work that refuses to be neatly filed under ghost story or gorefest.
The Prognosis:
Tokyo Evil Hotel is less about narrative payoff than about immersion — in slime, in sorrow, in spectacle. It is a haunted funhouse mirror of Japan’s social anxieties, one that cackles, weeps, and bleeds in equal measure. Disjointed but unforgettable, it reminds us why Nishimura remains a cult legend: because no one else so gleefully drags horror into the gutter, then refracts it through neon into something unnervingly beautiful.
- Saul Muerte
Surgeons of Horror 