The Sound of Summer | Blu-ray (Unearthed Films)
Director: Guy
Cast: Kaori Hoshino, Shinya Hankawa, Keita Kusaka, Kiyomi Kametani, Kuromi Kirishima
Running Time: 75 min.
By Henry McKeand
The Sound of Summer, the first full length effort from the Japan-based, British-born director known as “Guy,” opens with a transformation. A cicada sheds its skin in unsettling close-up; it’s akin to seeing an alien parasite burst forth from a suffering host. Against a black background, it looks uncanny, almost computer generated, and the scene is soundtracked by the miniature cacophony of buzzing insects. It’s a disorienting, eerie beginning that makes you feel as if the bug could break through the screen itself and fly out at you.
Immediately after this striking visual, a goofy rock song kicks in. This is followed by a low-budget montage of someone using a net to catch unthreatening cicadas in broad daylight as the opening credits roll. This looks more like a high school video project than a vessel for the near-cosmic horror of the opening metamorphosis.
The tonal polarity between these two sequences defines The Sound of Summer, which is torn between high-minded dread and kitschy fun. These competing perspectives don’t always complement each other. Nevertheless, it’s an audacious feature debut for Guy, who has the straight-from-a-nightmare imagination of the best horror directors even when his execution is muddled.
The inspired concept is loaded with perverse potential. The titular “sound of summer” refers to the ambient chirps and whirs of the cicadas that (maybe literally?) get under the skin of the protagonist: a young café worker played by newcomer Kaori Hoshino. Her simple life is interrupted when she meets an odd man (Shinya Hankawa) who comes into her café with a face mask and containers full of writhing insects. Without ever speaking to him, she gives him the nickname “Cicada Man” and begins to suspect that his intentions are sinister. She gradually becomes convinced that his small creatures have infected her body, kicking off a strange journey into paranoia and self-harm.
It’s the best kind of scary movie setup, taking something seemingly harmless that everyone has experienced (the warm season courtship cries of cicadas) and turning it into a source of terror. Those noises are everywhere, which makes early scenes of mundane life suspenseful. Sadly, many early scenes work as harmless filler, establishing a “normal” life that’s too mundane to care about. The music in this act one stretch, which veers into sounding like a stock music soundtrack, doesn’t help things.
But even when the characters go about their workdays in a digital daytime glow, there’s the threat that we’ll be suddenly taken back to that dreamlike visual of the sinister, molting cicada. Here, the questions are scarier than the answers. Why is there so much focus on these bugs? What are they capable of? When the unpleasantries escalate and the mystery fades, so does the tension.
Luckily, Guy mostly avoids the played-out “is it all a delusion?” safety net that so many independent psychological horror indies rely on. No, this is a film dedicated to actually showing you what you should be afraid of in unambiguous detail, which makes it more interesting than the majority of Rosemary’s Baby-lites that have come out in recent years. For better or worse, most of the meager budget has clearly gone to gooey, z-movie special effects that will be catnip for people who seek out obscure body-horror flicks.
The turning point comes midway through the film when Hoshino, convinced that there are cicadas inside of her, decides that she’s going to cut them out. What follows is a red-food-syrup-splattered gorefest; Cabin Fever by way of Cronenberg shooting on an iPhone. The squishy effects are as hilarious as they are disgusting. The heightened bloodiness and behind-the-scenes inventiveness are charming, but they distract from what could have been mind-numbingly disturbing if handled with more seriousness.
This boils down to a matter of taste. Do you like your horror with a film nerd grin or a hardened scowl? The playfulness is appealing while also undermining later scenes that reach for a higher sense of human fear. By the end, it’s more of a D.I.Y. FX showcase than a fleshed-out story.
If you love this sort of thing, you already know. The imagery is scary, and rubber horror prosthetics are always fun, but it’s hard not to think of what could be if Guy fully and earnestly commits to his macabre visions in the future. For the time being, The Sound of Summer is an interesting glimpse into an exciting filmmaker to watch in the coming years.
Henry McKeand’s Rating: 5.5/10
