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The online film magazine Combustible Celluloid offers new movie reviews, DVD reviews, film reviews, actor interviews, actress interviews, director interviews, film books and all things cinema related for the thoughtful and passionate. Online for ten years! Over 3000 reviews!

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Charisma (1999)

Rating: 3 Stars (out of 4)

Forest for the Trees

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

Buy Charisma on DVD.

Unlike his Cure and Séance, Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Charisma is not a strict horror film. Nevertheless it contains several strange touches all filtered through the director's unique sensibility. Charisma unfolds almost as if in a nightmare. A fatigued, disgraced detective (frequent Kurosawa leading man Koji Yakusho) leaves the city and gets dropped off randomly in the woods. Once there, he meets a handful of strange people, each of them obsessed by a bizarre tree. One man believes that the tree must live, even at the expense of the other trees around it, while a lady scientist believes that the natural ecosystem must be restored. Our detective bounces back and forth between odd meetings and conversations with a seemingly endless parade of weirdos. Kurosawa's quiet, observant direction strikes a delicate tone somewhere between irony and poetry, as when, at the end of certain lengthy shots, trees suddenly and decisively fall to the ground. Though Kurosawa (no relation to Akira) never bothers to resolve any environmental arguments, he still somehow manages to leave Charisma off with a satisfying, almost refreshing, click.

DVD Details: Extras include an interview with Kurosawa, a making-of documentary, trailers for Charisma, Cure and Séance and a liner notes essay by Tom Mes (MidnightEye.com).

Starring: Koji Yakusho, Hiroyuki Ikeuchi, Ren Osugi, Yoriko Douguchi, Jun Fubuki
Written by: Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Directed by: Kiyoshi Kurosawa
MPAA Rating: NR
Language: Japanese with English subtitles
Running Time: 104 minutes
Date: June 24, 2005