[Film Review] Memories Sleeping in 'Underground', Imagination Excavated

Underground
Japan, 2025
Director: Kaori Oda

Official Website
https://underground-film.com/

What we see when the film begins is a tunnel somewhere and the darkness gaping open beyond it.

Soon, a chorus rises from the silence, layering over low-frequency sounds. Rough noise begins to crawl about like gamelan and kecak, and the colors of light, seemingly from projection mapping, dwell and sway upon the surface of the water. A passing metro, shadows crawling out into the outside world...

In this way, the body becomes 'accustomed' to the 'darkness'.

Using the darkness of the enclosed space of the movie theater as a catalyst, it synchronizes with the visuals and sound, creating a sensation as if the five senses are being conquered and opened one by one.

It is also a film without a clear story or anything that could be called dialogue. One could call it art or experimental film for that reason. But more than that, I felt it was a 'film of experience' accompanied by the sensations mentioned above.

It reminded me of a workshop I once participated in called 'Dialogue in the Dark'.
In this event, the light level gradually drops as you move from room to room, eventually reaching '100% pure' darkness. The dialogue between participants, conducted after stripping away the vision we often rely on in daily life, becomes an experience distinct from that held under light, offering various realizations.

This film, too, stirs the imagination by tuning the viewer's senses.
Is this what one might call a sixth sense? We are inevitably forced to chew and interpret the collage-like information provided by the film, and this seemed like an approach to ground the imagination and five senses necessary for that purpose.

The 'Shadow' that takes the form of a woman in the film is played by Nao Yoshigai, a dancer and filmmaker herself.

Perhaps that is why the film itself feels somewhat like a dance.
We usually go about our days without being conscious of the surprisingly complex functions of our bodies or the mechanisms that control and maintain the whole. However, to 'dance'—to liberate the body from the shackles of daily life and manipulate it dynamically—one must inevitably face the body itself. I think this image of bodily dialogue is transformed in this film into a dialogue with the 'underground,' into imagination and understanding.

Also, even without a single correct story common to everyone, one notices that there is indeed a 'movement' or 'flow' with a certain direction. It is the movement of water veins running underground, the flow and circulation of blood through the body. Through this film and Yoshigai's movements, the two link together.

When the 'Shadow' touches walls, stones, or bones, a metallic sound like rubbing bells together rings out. There is also a scene where she cuts vegetables in a kitchen.
At that moment, we are reminded that we, too, are beings who ingest water and minerals, store them in our bodies, and stand with bones as our support. Now, the rock walls of the 'underground' become one with our flesh.

Through the accumulation of such realizations, the 'underground' in the film eventually reaches the Okinawa Gama (caves used as air-raid shelters during the Battle of Okinawa in WWII), where a male storyteller (guide) speaks at length about episodes from the war.

In the state after having gone through the process of assimilating with the 'underground' itself and riding the 'Shadow' in the first half of the film, the way it is heard and its depth of penetration will surely feel clearly different from usual. The bated breath of those hiding from American soldiers, the hardness and coldness of the ground where families who died of starvation were laid—these can now be grasped as things that exist 'here.' At least, it makes us believe so.

Furthermore, the scene jumps from Okinawa to Yubari in Hokkaido, which could be called its polar opposite. This is the place where the Kashima district, once submerged by dam construction, existed, and Kashima was also an area that flourished due to coal mines (≈ caves). The gray, silent water surface and the protruding trees look like scenery from another planet.

Here too, through the mediating images of submerged caves and submerging water, one can see that whether it is Okinawa or Hokkaido, one can trace and connect through the blood vessels and blood of the 'underground'.

And I realize that this work was also a film about memory / record.

Experiences during the war and the scenery of towns submerged under water are naturally being lost as time passes and fewer people have actual experience of them. However, someone can pass on those memories instead and preserve them as records.

It might feel difficult (and indeed it is) to maintain the same purity as the people involved, but there is surely meaning in human activity in that attempt itself, isn't there? History can be called an accumulation of how human memories are recorded, organized, selected, and curated.
Just as one approaches and tries to understand someone by groping in the dark, like the storyteller conveying the tales of the Gama, and like this film...

'Underground' uses a meditative approach to stir the imagination in the dark, dissolving the boundaries between space and others, and showing that anyone can become a participant in memory and record.
This is because we realize that we are all made of the same water and minerals, that they came from the same 'underground,' and that we will eventually return to the 'underground.' This leans more toward the occult or spiritual, but it brings to mind stories like 'water memory,' and at the very least, it will serve as an aid to the imagery.

Herein lies the necessity of this work being a 'film.' Film (moving images) was also a tool created by humans to share memories and records beyond individual limits. In that sense, this work, which might seem strange at first glance, might actually be said to be purely cinematic through and through.