By Simon Thompson
St. John’s wort, as translated from its original Japanese title Otogirisio, is an adaptation of the 1992 horror visual novel of the same name by Koichi Nakamura, which, if you are weebish in any way, will be a familiar name to you through his work on the first five DragonQuest games and the Danganronpa series. This adaptation, directed by Ten Shimoyama and written by Goro Nakajima, however, is a frustrating exercise in that its disjointed pacing wastes an incredibly solid premise and a cast of competent and likeable actors.
The plot of St. John’s Wort follows a trio of game developer close friends named Toko (Reiko Matsuo), Kohei (Yōichirō Saitō) , and Shinichi (Kōji Okura) respectively. After attending the funeral of Kohei’s ex-girlfriend’s mother Nami ( Megumi Okina), Kohei asks Nami to let him use her as a model for a character in the game that he’s working on and also if he could visit her inheritance, an old creepy mansion situated in the countryside, to use it as backdrops for his game. Once they get there they discover the garden is full of St. John’s wort, but, given what is actually inside the house, that is the least of their worries.
While on paper this sounds like a good premise, the confusing editing of the film and constant chopping and changing between what’s going on at the mansion and with the design team, who are in a different location, makes understanding most of the key plot events harder than deciphering someone from Greenock after seven pints.
This back and-forth between the two sets of characters was very much a deliberate choice by Shimoyama and Nakajima to create a sense of video game-like interactivity with the movie, as either the player- or the characters calling on a support team for hints, or exploring around an environment, is a common trope from pretty much every point and click adventure game/survival horror ever made.
While this works well within the context of an interactive medium, in a passive medium which a movie is, it comes across as irritating, and makes you feel like you’re watching somebody else play a video game badly rather than watching a well-constructed three act story that keeps you guessing.
Once you start to get a handle on this movie’s plot however, in the second half you are confronted with a laughably silly twist that isn’t even an enjoyable in a so-bad-its-good way, and that completely destroys any of the tense atmosphere that, to its credit, the first act did a pretty decent job of trying to build.
On the other hand, however, there is a lot to like about St. Johns wort’s cinematography. The creepy mansion location specifically, as well as the visuals in general, are enhanced by cinematographer Kazuhiko Ogura’s use of grainy, almost sepia tone filters, and by Shimoyama’s use of intimate and claustrophobic angles which do an excellent job of making the audience feel trapped inside the house themselves.
Overall, despite some neat visual flourishes and some decent, if not exactly stand out performances by the main cast, St. Johns wort is a movie which suffers from a patchy script and meandering pacing which makes a tight near ninety minutes feel like a Ken Burns documentary being played at 0.25. If you want to seek out some J-horror off the beaten path, this is very much a movie to avoid.
St. John’s Wort is now available as part of Arrow Video’s J-Horror Rising boxset.
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