A whole series of disturbing events unfold inside a hospital, in which the staff is reduced to a minimum: due to a wrong administration, a patient, suffering from severe burns, dies, and the medical team decides, in unison, to conceal the cause of death. At the same time, the arrival of an ambulance to the emergency room generates chaos: a man is forgotten on a stretcher along the lanes of the medical center.
The consequences are, to say the least, dramatic because the individual left without any kind of rescue presents with an unusual viral form that dissolves the internal organs, having caused a severe state of confusion in the minds of the infected.
While a nurse, analyzing a mental dissociate, disquisitions on the concept of mental "perception" and reality-objective and subjective-the Virus quickly spreads involving the team guilty of a patient's death. The clinic director, cynically, forbids seeking assistance in order to boast of an antidote against the infection: but by then it is too late, even if reality is not what it "appears" to be...
Masayuki Ochiai directs a resounding film that departs, sharply, from the flat narrative landscape that, to date, invests Western cinematography. He introduces a story that, for 60 minutes, holds one in suspense, then exploding, in the serconda part of the film, in a series of revolting splatter effects (the dissolving of internal organs) and introducing an alternative "reading" plan to the unfolding of the story.
The story has been likened to Von Trier's famous The Kingdom for its hospital setting, but we are definitely far from this model, mainly because of an enigmatic narrative (the last 20 minutes). Suffice it, in this regard, to recall that Akai (one of the film's lead doctors) means red in Japanese, just as the apple (used by a nurse to explain the concept of "perceived reality") is red and so are the ambulance lights that introduce the infected into the hospital...
A note of merit to the film's cinematography, which, composed predominantly of blue, green and purple tones, well represents the "cold" and aseptic atmosphere that reigns in the film.
While, for a moment, we seem to be watching a Carpenter (The Thing) or Cronenberg (bodily devastation and contagion) style film, about the conclusion one wonders, amid doubts and disappointments. But perhaps the only meaning of the ending is not clarification, not explanation ... as much as seeking an "alternative" meaning to the film, which developed in closing without narrative patterns, reflecting only on what Masayuki Ochiai's talent wanted to communicate to us.
Review by Undying1
