Masters of Horror: Episode 26 Dream Cruise

There was originally supposed to be a tradition that every season of Masters of Horror would include one episode set in Japan by a Japanese director. Since the show ran for only two seasons, we had only two such episodes: Takashi Miike's Imprint and Norio Tsuruta's Dream Cruise. It's sad that this tradition doesn't carry over to Fear Itself, where the only Asian-born director was Hong Kong's Ronny Yu, who was likely recruited for directing Freddy vs Jason.

Dream Cruise feels far more distinctly foreign than Imprint. While it has an American protagonist (Daniel Gillies), the Japanese characters never speak English among themselves as they did in Imprint. I'd say that Imprint was largely about the American character, representing as much his fantasies about Japan as the reality.

Dream Cruise, on the other hand, has the American protagonist largely as a witness to supernatural events that are culturally foreign to him. One of the two main flashbacks in the episode is a vision created by a Japanese ghost, and given to a Japanese character. So, while this was made for an American audience, I imagine that it could be viewed happily by Japanese Cinema buffs as well.

The final precursor to my review is this: The episode was shot as a 90-minute feature, but shortened to 60-minutes for broadcast. I understand that the DVD release featured the 90-minute version, but I purchased the series through Amazon, which features the 60-minute broadcast version. I apologize for any cut material I fail to cover.

The protagonist, Jack Miller (Gillies), is an American lawyer who has worked in Japan for several years. In spite of this, he acknowledges that his Japanese is still terrible, and so the Japanese characters have to accommodate him with English. Jack's story is defined by two main traits: an all-consuming fear of the water, due to his failure to save his brother Sean (Ethan Amis) from drowning as a child, and his affair with Yuri (Yoshino Kimura), the wife of his client Eiji Saito (Ryu Ishibashi).

When Eiji invites Jack and Yuri out on a boat trip, they suspect that he's onto them and planning their murder. He was able to marry Yuri because his previous wife disappeared. While there's no proof that he killed her, and she was known to be mentally unstable, the suspicion is obvious.

We see Eiji scowling a lot aboard the boat, and constantly dropping snarky hints to Jack and Yuri that he knows. But before Eiji can attempt his murder plot he is forced to go down into the water to investigate problems with the propeller, which turns out to be caused by the ghost of his murdered wife, Naomi (Miho Ninagawa). He's killed by the propeller, but reconstituted and possessed by the wife, who wants revenge on Yuri.

At the same time, the boat begins receiving radio broadcasts calling out Jack's name. Jack, not realizing the true nature of the supernatural attack, suspects that his brother has returned for revenge. I'm not sure the exact moment he figures out that the hostile ghost isn't his brother. Yuri has a vision which she explicitly tells Jack about in the last fifteen minutes, but I'm not sure if Jack had stuck with the “brother” theory until that moment. It doesn't hugely affect the episode either way.

Naomi's attack escalates over the course of the episode. She holds Eiji's body together for a while, but eventually discards it, and attacks Jack and Yuri with powers including hallucinations, water manipulation, more of the aforementioned possession, and generally whatever other powers the plot requires her to have. I don't say this as a criticism, merely an observation. This is a Japanese ghost story, it isn't supposed to make sense.

Sean does, eventually, show up in a protective capacity. However, I feel that this is something of a missed opportunity. Sean makes only two real appearances, the first to snap Jack out of a Naomi-induced hallucination that nearly led him to kill Yuri, and again to fight off Naomi when she tries to drown them. If you're going to have two ghosts, from two wildly different cultural mythologies go to war, you should give them each plenty of screen-time. Instead, Naomi dominates the entire latter half of the episode. While I know she isn't really supposed to make sense, I'm utterly baffled by why Naomi is revealed to be the one calling Jack's name, instead of Sean. It eliminates any build-up to Sean's presence.

To touch on the performances, I would say that Gillies does an effective job, but nothing special. Kimura, though, is something of a weakness. She's not terrible, and does fine in all the Japanese scenes, but she seems to have trouble conveying strong emotions when speaking English. This is a bit surprising, because her Wikipedia page says she was born in England. I suspect that she may have crippled her acting range a bit by exaggerating her accent. It would probably have worked better if she just reverted to Japanese whenever her character panicked, even when she and Jack were alone.

Ishibashi, though, really steals the show prior to his possession. In my first viewing, I saw him as an entertaining Ham, verbally building up to the murder he was planning as he taunts Jack and Yuri. On the second viewing, though, I think I caught a deeper level. We find out via Yuri's vision that he killed Naomi because she was a loveless marriage for money, and she had intentionally made his life Hell for some time. Killing a woman he actually loves for falling out of love with him is on the razor-edge of his twisted moral code, so he's putting the act off and debating it while making a show of bravado.

I'm somewhat interested to see the 90-minute version of this, and think I'll likely come back to review it at some point. I hope Sean has a greater presence. Even in it's current form, though, I recommend it.