Inugami (2001)

I fake middle-aged bespectacled woman, Miki, makes traditional paper by hand using a bunch of hand-made bamboo gadgetry in an isolated forest in an isolated village on an island in rural Japan. A visible CGI wind blows through and knocks a bunch of her paper over.

A young man, immature and incompetent, comes from Tokyo to take a job as a schoolteacher in the village. The local paper dealer shows him the ropes, and introduces him to the paper girl. He has a brief hallucination in the woods that will never be explained. He immediately has a crush on her.

Miki comes from a large and complicated local family, the Bonomiya clan, which is separated into the large, wealthy house with the clan leader, and the smaller, inferior, lesser-Bonomiya family which includes Miki and sixish of her immediate family, along with the woods and the papermaking house.

Miki herself has a complicated history, too. It starts trickling out some hints, namely that she was once pregnant. Abstract imagery – a baby floating to the surface of her papermaking water – implies she lost the child. Later revelations will explain that it was not so simple. Miki's mom talks about how sad it was that the baby was lost.

A super duper cool shot of a bunch of men planning a parking lot inside her chest cavity has pretty much nothing to do with the movie. It's like they had this great idea, it didn't match the movie they were actually making, and they said "fuck it!" and did it anyway. Which was a good decision.

Miki heads down to the pharmacy and asks to fill her mother's prescription, and the pharmacist squints inquisitively. There was already something weird about the mother scene before, and at this point it's basically clanging all of the bells. If you haven't figured out already that her mother is long dead, you haven't seen enough horror movies. Regardless, she hangs out with her mother.

A hunter who looks vaguely like Beat Takeshi in Zatoichi is friends with the main Bonomiya family, and tends to be in the background either witnessing events or explaining events he has recently witnessed. It's a very Shakespearean role, a part-time narrator deeply intertwined in the action, woven well into the story so his presence both makes sense and helps move the story along naturally.

Miki suddenly becomes much younger and doesn't need glasses anymore. People kind of vaguely notice, but don't care much. The schoolteacher becomes all the more enamored with her. They hook up in a cave after she reveals to him a bit more of her mysterious history: that she once hooked up with somebody else in that exact same cave and conceived a baby from it.

Her mom, who we don't yet know is dead except who is obviously dead, gives her a magic flower pot and tells her it is her duty to watch over it now. The job of the women in the family is to take the magic flower pot out once per day and count the gods who live in it. There should be thirty-something Inugami, "dog gods", floating around in the pot. She says they get out sometimes and cause chaos around town. Miki tells her she's batshit insane, though Miki is also hallucinating the entire event.

As Miki and schoolteacher's relationship advances, the townsfolk start quarreling and strange goings on go on. The townsfolk start calling Miki Inugami, and various people saying various things in disjointed conversations and a bunch of angry fights sloppily piece together the local myth: the women of the Bonomiya clan are generationally cursed by the dog gods, have to appease them to keep the townsfolk safe from harm, and the townsfolk hate them for it.

In the mean time, the wife-beating, gambling drunkard who heads the main Bonomiya clan has privately lost all of family money, and has decided to sell off all of their land and the papermaking house to pay his debts. The rest of his family hates him bitterly for it, but simultaneously respect hierarchical authority.

More revelations, crazier and crazier: the guy Miki slept with in the cave was the leader of her own clan, and her brother, who is still in love with her. She had her brother's baby. It didn't die, but was secretly put of for adoption. The baby grew up, became a schoolteacher, and she's now incestuously pregnant with her own incest child, for a double-incest baby. Her mother is dead, but sometimes she thinks she is her own mother. The schoolteacher learns all of this insanity, and simply doubles down and proposes to her.

The townsfolk decide it's easier just to murder them all, but they're beaten to the punch by the clan leader who tries to murder-suicide the whole family on his own. Many of them die violently at their traditional family festival, which is filmed in black-and-white for traditional reasons.

Our two incestuous lovebirds nearly escape, when the patient Shakespearean hunter arises from a thicket and turns this little love story to a tragedy. Not that it wasn't already one once we learned about all of this recursive incest. Yeesh.