Review of Sky High (2003) by Paul C — 17 Jan 2011

NOTE: DO NOT CONFUSE THIS WITH THE 2005 WALT DISNEY MOVIE WHICH (SADLY) BEARS THE SAME TITLE.

Sky High is an interesting hybrid of various genres and cinematic styles, directed by Japanese auteur Kitamura. The film is a metaphysical love story, a samurai movie, a horror movie and a detective story.

A serial killer who is a Nobel laureate scientist with an obsessive interest in the occult, extracts the hearts of young women, to perform a ritual with 6 extracted hearts in order to summon demons who can grant him any wish.

Mina, the wife of the detective who is on the trail of the killer becomes one of his victims. In the afterlife, she meets the gorgeous Eihi Shiina (the main actress from Audition) who is some sort of celestial receptionist. Shiina presents Mina with 3 choices: enter paradise, haunt the world as a ghost or avenge her killer, but be condemned to eternal hell afterwards.

The film oscillates between calm sequences of religious contemplation and ethereal imagery and kinetic action sequences with samurai swords, guns and martial arts moves.

Sky High is philosophically profound and emotionally powerful, yet very well paced and never sentimental. Kitamura has an eye for ultra slick visual effects; the cinematography, action sequence, choreography are all immaculate, but more importantly Kitamura manages to conjure up some genuinely original, surreal, otherworldly and aesthetically potent images, especially in the sequences which depict what happens after we die, something I imagine, every human being is interested in. As the icing of the cake, the film stars some of the most stunningly beautiful gals of Japanese cinema (and believe me, they have one hell of a nice range to choose from).