WOWOW TV, the pioneer and adherent of the "film texture" of Japanese TV dramas, only produces two types of suspense works, one is that it has a film texture, dullness, and it can be seen at the beginning that it is a serious effort to shoot but it is not a round story; the other is that it has a film texture, dull, and it is not the kind of dazzling surprise at the beginning, but the story is very stable, which can make people watch it all the time and do not feel bad.
The august new drama "EERIE ~ Invisible Face" starring Oda, Nakasato Isa, and Kuroshima Yui belongs to the second type in terms of the angle of TV series shooting, the story is calmly advanced, the suspenseful atmosphere is properly pinched, there is no sound effect at first, no character shouting and stomping in the darkness, but it will make people feel cold on their backs, and after watching it, they will even feel panicked.
But if you read the novel of the same name by Professor Hiroshi Maekawa of Hosei University in Japan before watching the drama, you may be disappointed by the story that follows, and even end up concluding that "the quality of the TV series shooting is superior, but the story is debatable". In short, "EERIE ~ Invisible Face" is not a tv series that is superior in all aspects, but it is still worth watching.
The novel's author, Hiroshi Maekawa, chose the word "EERIE" as the title of the story, which fully illustrates the style of the novel, EERIE is a word derived from the Scottish language, meaning "grotesque, weird", with a particular emphasis on the kind of "weirdness" that makes people feel uncomfortable, terrifying, or nervous.
The novel seems to be a multi-line narrative, mainly from the perspective of the male protagonist, supplemented by the perspective of the criminal police, but in fact there is only one theme, that is, normal daily life is being eroded by strange things step by step, the original normal people around are being alienated, daily life is being dismembered, only the skin of the surface is connected to make it look still in the initial appearance, but in fact, only this layer of painting skin remains, and the bottom has long been disintegrated.
If the reader can treat the novel as a co-composition of the Kurosawa Kiyoshi movie "The Walking Aggressor", then this suspenseful story involving a Japanese cult is more likely to be forgiven.
This story tells how familiar daily life has become strange and chaotic, the protagonist is a private university literature teacher Hirokawa, in his forties, no children, the lectures are dull and boring, not popular with students, because he and the director of the Academic Affairs Office are the same year, so they have been running errands, living in a seemingly peaceful and quiet residential area, the neighbors seem to be middle-class families. His life is two points and one line, and in general, it can be divided into two parts: going to work and leaving work. "EERIE ~ Invisible Face" is about how the two parts of going to work and leaving work collapse separately.
The beginning of the "weird" incident was a doorbell, and the woman outside the door, who called herself "Hachijo", wanted to talk to Hiroka about his wife who had just passed away, and Hiroka, out of curiosity, opened the door and found that there was no one outside the door.
Later stories, TV series and novels adopt different plot settings, or rather, the TV series switches the time point in which the events in the novel appear. For example, TV drama viewers know from the beginning that the male protagonist played by Oda Chejō and the heroine Mizushima Rei played by Nakari Isa have a physical relationship, but this relationship is not exposed in the novel until the university personnel struggle in which the male protagonist teaches has entered a white-hot stage.
The order of strange events is also different. In the novel, it begins with the nameless body found at the garbage collection office, followed by the death of the "Hachijo" who was once suspected of ringing the doorbell of the Hirokawa family, and finally the wife of the neighbor who lives across from Hirokawa, who suddenly falls unconscious and is pulled away by an ambulance. In the TV series, the order is different, with Ms. Hachijo passing away first, followed by a neighbor's wife seeking medical treatment, and finally finding the nameless body. Although all three things show that Hirokawa's daily life has begun to become different, the adjustment order does show a gradual and escalating effect of suspense from the perspective of film and television, and even makes people look forward to the subsequent adaptation of the TV series.
After work, there are constant strange events in life, and the time to work is not calm. The initiative to elect a president stirred up thousands of waves, and private universities divided into two factions to select candidates, one was to select well-known professors of psychology as candidates for the three disciplines of literature, international relations and sociology, and the other was law, engineering and economics, which believed that the humanities and social sciences had no use and could be reduced or even abolished. The two factions did not give in to Mai Mang, the election preparation activities had just begun, and the psychology professor who was a candidate for the humanities and social sciences school was exposed to the bad behavior of intimidating students, and the momentum fell to the other side, which led to the follow-up male protagonist being driven to the duck shelf as a by-election candidate, but this is a later story.
The theme of "EERIE ~ Invisible Face" is suspense, and under the suspense is the collapse of life. Although it makes sense that the widespread cult is used as a tool to dismember life, it is obviously a shortcut, and the weaknesses of human nature are not exposed by life, but are stimulated by the concept of the cult because of illness and suffering. Why aren't the more lifelike things like cults everywhere?
The niece of the criminal police officer in charge of the male protagonist's community case constitutes the branch line of the story, she has nothing directly to do with the main story of the college personnel struggle, cult erosion of life, she is only an assistant to explain that once people are weak, life will soon fall apart, the little nurse played by Kuroshima Yuri is just in love with the self-motivated cowherd, she is not a Korean female star Choi Zhen, you can open a company to change the cowherd to a more dignified identity and then walk into the marriage hall in a white wedding dress that symbolizes purity. The little nurse just wants to express love, and the only expression of love that the object of her love can accept is money, in order to make money, the simple and lack of concentration of the little nurse becomes almost a knife cut of life, look, life becomes strange is so easy.
The length of six episodes reduces the cost of watching "EERIE ~ Invisible Face", even if the story makes people feel a little risky, but the quality of the TV series still makes people feel that occasionally trying risky activities is also a little exciting, watching life towards a little gloomy Oda Cut to give way, it is worth it.