Ryuta Sato plays Shogo, the obnoxious, condescending host of a late night call-in radio program. Temporarily, he and his staff must operate out of a booth, Studio 6, that is supposedly haunted after a previous D. J. committed suicide. Over the course of 24 hours, while Shogo is doing a special on "unpardonable words", he indeed begins to be haunted by memories of things he's done in the past, and we discover that he really has been pure slime for a long time.
"The Booth" gets a lot of mileage out of a simple set-up, a minimum amount of actors and locations, and increasingly intense atmosphere. For a while, it *is* awfully talky, but it really works in the sense that writer / director Yoshihiro Nakamura is always upping the ante in terms of how stressed-out Shogo gets. We get plenty of flashbacks to his long-ago past and recent past, and can see that he has plenty to feel guilty about. He ultimately starts having macabre visions, particularly one of a former lover. In the end, the material is pretty powerful, even if it's true that it doesn't hold *many* surprises. Touches of the supernatural are handled with subtlety, and Nakamura is able to creep out the viewer without going overboard on jump scares and frenetic camera movement and/or editing.
And Nakamura really gets to the point throughout, as his little film wraps up in a very short amount of time: 75 minutes all told. Sato is excellent as the troubled lead, who's compelling without being a particularly sympathetic individual.
This is good enough to deserve a wider audience.
Seven out of 10.
"The Booth" gets a lot of mileage out of a simple set-up, a minimum amount of actors and locations, and increasingly intense atmosphere. For a while, it *is* awfully talky, but it really works in the sense that writer / director Yoshihiro Nakamura is always upping the ante in terms of how stressed-out Shogo gets. We get plenty of flashbacks to his long-ago past and recent past, and can see that he has plenty to feel guilty about. He ultimately starts having macabre visions, particularly one of a former lover. In the end, the material is pretty powerful, even if it's true that it doesn't hold *many* surprises. Touches of the supernatural are handled with subtlety, and Nakamura is able to creep out the viewer without going overboard on jump scares and frenetic camera movement and/or editing.
And Nakamura really gets to the point throughout, as his little film wraps up in a very short amount of time: 75 minutes all told. Sato is excellent as the troubled lead, who's compelling without being a particularly sympathetic individual.
This is good enough to deserve a wider audience.
Seven out of 10.