But let me back up a moment. Carved is about a mysterious woman who appears and abducts children. She is dressed in a long coat, caries a long pair of scissors, and wears a surgical mask over her face. She has these weird pale blue eyes and her face is, well, slit. She’s an urban legend all over Japan, but the disappearance of a boy in the park incites a man hunt.
It’s a pretty simple premise and I thought it was pretty cool when I first heard of it. And the movie is actually pretty good if formulaic. I wasn’t exceptionally creeped out by it though. The fact that the woman preyed on kids was creepy. But overall the movie didn’t grab my attention as much as I thought it would. It wasn’t boring, but it wasn’t incredibly entertaining either.
Carved dwells somewhere in the middle ground I’d say. Not really good, but not really bad either. It’s a decent little movie. Maybe if I had kids of my own I would find it scarier.
The only thing that bothered me a lot about this movie was the depictions of child abuse. It was weird because I couldn’t decide if the movie was implying that every mom shown in the movie was an abuser or not. At least three were for certain…the rest might have been merely sick (Spoiler: the ghost possesses women to take its human form. Possession is signified by coughing fits.) The focus on abuse was sort of interesting to me in that it was exclusively mothers shown as abusive. In America we tend to associate any sort of physical abuse with father’s, but that wasn’t the case in this movie at least. Is this sort of thing a problem in Japan? I have no idea. It could be the writer just didn’t like his mom, or was abused himself. I don’t really know but I did find that interesting.
That being said, the other part that got to me involved the origin sequence for the slit-mouthed woman. It’s creepy and screwed up on a lot of levels. Other than those bits and a scene were a guy gets his Achilles tendons severed I wasn’t overly bothered by this movie.
I’ll call it an entry level horror…not as genuinely creepy and mind screwing as Ringu or Audition, but not as awful as Grotesque. Somewhere in the middle and you know what? There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s an all around decent flick.
But then I’ll leave that up to you. Let me know what you think!
Oh, and if a tall lady in a surgical mask asks you if she’s pretty…I’d advise running away as fast as possible. Or maybe just tell her she’s pretty…maybe she’ll let you off. Or not. Least you won’t die tired right?
