Another is a slow-burn Mystery/Horror
type of show. It’s somewhat similar to the Final Destination series
(at least as far as I know the series, which is getting the premise
and having seen one film out of it) in that the horror comes not from
any sort of monster or serial killer, but rather from fate conspiring
to cause deaths. Where it meets success or failure is the fact that
once the horror really turns on, it goes all the way with the gore.
On one hand, Another does have its fundamentals down better than some
other shows I could name. On the other hand, the over-the-top Rube
Goldberg demises could easily come across as unintentional comedy.
Where on the spectrum does Another fall?
Well, before we get into the bloody red
meat of the material, let’s talk about some of the window dressing.
Because, even in horror that trades heavily in its gore, that can’t
be the only thing a work has going for it. You need characters,
atmosphere, and a story in order to succeed.
Of those, Atmosphere is what Another
does best, and for the most part it really does a good job of
building and maintaining that. There are some relief valves, like
the beach episode or the brief but memorable daydream scene, but in a
12-episode series that’s kind of necessary. The lighting and
cinematography are on point and though they can sometimes be a little
heavy handed (a dutch angle as a sudden blast of wind stirs dead
leaves across the scene) they are effective. Another wants to be
unsettling, and even if it might try a wee bit too hard in places, it
does get there.
I think one of the best ways to
encapsulate everything that’s right and wrong about Another’s
approach to atmosphere would have to be the dolls. The opening
features dolls heavily, and there are several scenes (the first of
which is quite creepy) that take place in a dimly-lit doll shop.
Dolls, in case you aren’t aware, have the possibility to be amazingly
creepy. Especially when you’re talking about extremely realistic
dolls, they exist in the Uncanny Valley.
For those unfamiliar with the term, the Uncanny Valley refers to a graph of how well humans relate to something versus how humanlike that something is. On the whole it rises as the subject gets more human, but there’s a deep trough (potentially deeper even than the most inhuman visages) in a thin band just below the absolute most human echelons. This trough contains things we find ‘uncanny’ – unsettling because of their nearness to what we recognize as a fellow person but failure to go all the way. Corpses, Zombies, Dolls, and Clowns (thanks to their make-up) are all common inhabitants of the Valley. If you’ve ever wondered why character models from the early days of games attempting to depict ‘realistic’ 3D humans are creepy as sin, this is also probably why.
So you’re in a horror story and there
are a lot of creepy dolls running around. Like, they’re all over as
a motif and there’s a setting that sees the characters absolutely
surrounded by little porcelain hellspawn blankly staring from the
shadows where you can’t quite make them out. The mood is just right
for a scare; you hand that setup to most horror writers and you can
bet that the dolls will do something evil before the end. Another,
however… never actually does. Yeah, against all odds we’re in a
paranormal horror story surrounded by dolls and they never involve
themselves in anything actually sinister. True, typical doll
creepiness (that usually involves the suckers animating) wouldn’t
have been germane to Another, but they aren’t even involved in any of
the deaths, and the kills in this show include an ultra-memorable
demise by umbrella of all things.
In some ways, this is actually genius.
The dolls are a setup begging for a payoff that never comes, so even
if you’re genre savvy enough to realize that the dolls aren’t going
to be possessed or any nonsense like that (please be genre savvy)
you’re consciously or subconsciously waiting for the other shoe to
drop. The anticipation heightens what fear you might have, and puts
you on edge for the actual non-doll-related scares that come down the
road. In other ways, it’s a bit much, especially for something that
doesn’t ‘pay off’ on its own.
In the meantime, the show does make use
of the motif in another way, as an unsubtle metaphor for Misaki Mei’s
home life with her dollmaker mother. It’s… not terrible.
Which is about what I can say about the
characters in general. They aren’t terrible. When we get down to
it, Another is decidedly not a character-driven show; the vast
majority of the cast is just there to be threatened with horrible
unnatural death, so they only have to be characters in as much as we
don’t actively want to see them exterminated in gruesome and
circuitous ways… but are kind of passively okay with watching most
of them spatter when it does happen.
It would be better if the characters
were better. I think Akazawa, the Chief of Countermeasures, is
probably the only character who got enough development that I could
actually like her and made enough of an impression that I did.
Sakakibara and Mei, our technical leads, are respectively bland and
enigmatic. The latter would normally be okay, especially with
atmospheric horror, but it doesn’t lead to the character being
particularly personable, and it does tie into one of the interesting
notes – or possibly big problems – with Another.
So, a brief note on what I’ve gathered
about Japanese culture: ‘reading the room’ is important. A person is
supposed to pick up on social cues and act accordingly without having
to be told, and it’s not a good thing to go against the will of the
group in general. This is fairly important in the first acts of
Another because Sakakibara doesn’t do a good job of reading the
creepy new class he’s transferred into, and inadvertently breaks
taboos he wasn’t told about. This can read badly to a western
audience, wondering why he was never told, but there’s a degree to
which he should have picked up on it, making his actions more like
the typical horror trope where the protagonists always ignorantly
sticks their noses into things that are obvious bad news.
But even understanding that, the fact
that the blame rests more on our lead’s shoulders than we might first
imagine, it only excuses so much. The characters in this show (like
many horror characters who maybe aren’t written the best) are really
bad at communicating important facts. A lot more people die in this
than had to, especially in the final acts, because characters chose
to keep their mouths shut even knowing that lives were on the line.
For this, allow me to delve into the
basic (spoiler) version of the supernatural goings on: Class 3-3
sometimes becomes haunted in a way that causes at least one person (a
class member or family within one degree of separation) to die every
month via contrived twists of fate. This is triggered when an extra
person joins the class, a dead person who shouldn’t be there and who
death is trying blindly to reclaim. OK so far. You don’t know who
the extra is, because everybody’s memories are messed with by the
scenario, so they seem to have as consistent backstory and presence,
same as everybody else. Fine. There is a countermeasure for the
curse: between the appearance of the extra and the first death, the
class has to pick someone and treat them as though they don’t exist,
“evening the numbers” and thus somehow confusing death into
thinking all is well until the extra vanishes in a puff of logic at
graduation. Great!
Another starts with a student
transferring into the cursed class, which triggers the class to enact
the Countermeasure due to needing an extra desk (even for mundane
reasons). However, people start dying anyway, and the deaths seem to
start a month late compared to where they’re supposed to. So what’s
going on? They didn’t tell Sakakibara about the un-personing of Mei
(a scapegoat role for which she volunteered) and he treats her as a
person – which is again more his mistake than theirs – but there
are bigger, badder communications issues than that leading to the
curse running rampant; despite our initial belief that our main
character may have ruined everything, that’s not actually the case.
Most of them have to do with Mei. You see, Mei can see the ‘color of
death’ on things, so she could know at a glance who the extra person
might be, meaning that she should have known that the curse was
starting and that the countermeasures should have been undertaken
before Sakakibara joined the party, or possibly that they might not
work because of the fact that the Extra this time around is an
abnormal scenario.
Second, Mei’s sister dies in the first
month when deaths are supposed to happen. Publicly, the death is
Mei’s cousin (which would be outside the bounds of the Curse) and not
her twin sister, since Mei was adopted by her aunt basically at
birth, and Mei reasonably doesn’t like talking about the lie that
pervades her home life. But she opens up enough to Sakakibara to
tell him later, so you’d think an “It’s already begun” heads up
to Akazawa would have been in order. She wouldn’t even have needed
to go into specific details; maybe she would have been pressed for
them, maybe not, but it would have saved a lot of lives not having
everyone working on the faulty late-start assumption.
And then, of course, there’s the
climax. Sakakibara and company learn from a hidden tape left by a
previous class how to stop the curse once it’s already begun and the
Countermeasure is ineffective: return the dead to death. Makes
sense, and after the dead person is back where they belong, there’s
the added benefit that no one will quite remember them, or murdering
them. They sit on this info for a little while, trying to decipher
how to bring it up and how to have the class find and kill the dead
without the whole thing turning into a game of Mafia. Naturally,
this results in it coming out in the worst way at the worst time and
a huge body count.
First, there are level-headed
classmates who aren’t initially in the know who could have helped,
but the bigger deal is that the calamity starts in part because one
of the members of the in-the-know circle decides to do some ghost
busting of his own and naturally attempts to murder the wrong target.
Have you noticed the problem? Even if Mei, keeping her doll eye
that can see death covered most of the time, hadn’t passively
identified the extra from the moment of her appearance, she should
have discovered the extra’s identity basically instantly upon knowing
what had to be done, and should have shared that information with…
well there’s a reason she doesn’t tell Sakakibara right away (it’s
his aunt, the TA, not a student) but she could have let at least the
others expecting to have to kill that person know. Or even just let
them know she knows who it is so they can trust her.
This kind of stupidity is par for the
course for certain brands of horror, but that doesn’t make it any
better.
So, that’s out of the way, let’s talk
about the deaths. The fact of the matter is, they’re kind of all
over the place. When the first death happens by umbrella through the
neck, it’s creative and gruesome. Seriously, that death out of all
of them really sticks with you. It’s fast enough to be effective, the
visuals support the horror of the moment, there’s a climate of fear –
the blood isn’t wasted at all, even if there is a ton of it. It’s a
pity most of the other deaths aren’t as good. For instance, when the
homeroom teacher opens up his own throat in front of the class,
drenching the front rows, there’s plenty of blood… but it’s not
felt quite as keenly because the setup for the scene is a little
weaker. It’s shocking, but there isn’t the same dread because there
ways in which it’s fairly expected. And… while I don’t personally
think Another hits anything comedic, I have to admit that deaths like
the teacher’s do get a little too over the top to be totally horrific
or dramatic. It breaches out of, more importantly than what’s
realistic, what we expect, and in doing so it takes us out of the
moment. Some of the more overly complex death sequences like death
by runaway earth mover or delayed death from hitting your head
discovered hours later at the beach by the blades of a passing motor
boat… it is a little like watching a game of mousetrap do its
thing.
The most effective deaths, other than
the Umbrella (which, thinking more about it, has the advantage of
being the very first death, more than one episode deep, and a
shocking swerve from the slow burn ghostly atmosphere) are generally
the quick ones. There’s a death in the endgame where one girl, with
a delightfully crazed look about her, is pursuing and attempting to
kill Mei thinking that Mei is the extra. The girl follows our leads
out a window, but loses her footing and falls to break her neck on
the ground below. It’s only a couple of seconds but the buildup of
her insane hunt and the way her body twists and breaks in all the
wrong directions on impact (in a creative and stomach-churning way,
not a rotten tomato splat of red) is really effective. Most of the
deaths like that happen in just the last couple of episodes.
Normally gore horror isn’t my scene but if you’re going to use it you
should at least use it well, and it’s a shame that Another’s quality
gore is really concentrated.
In general, the climax does a lot to
save the show. Okay, there are the stupid communication issues from
Mei compounding at that point, but there’s a real energy to the
sequence. The setup involves the whole class being at a hotel in the
mountains when the news about “return the dead to death” is made
public, along with some spurious accusations. The entire thing
breaks out into an insane riot. Some students are running for their
lives, others are determined to kill Mei (or maybe even whoever they
think the extra is) and if that wasn’t enough the whole place gets
set on fire, a fire that progresses in a delightfully detailed way
for scene blocking, adding smoke and crumbling architecture as well
of flames to the list of things trying to kill everybody. It’s utter
madness and feels like the characters have practically been launched
into the mouth of hell, all the more effective thanks to how slow and
deliberate the show had been up to that point. It’s a late payoff to
a long setup, but it really works. I think one of my favorite
moments is Akazawa’s death, though, because in the midst of all the
insanity it actually provides a breather. In contrast to the many
gruesome demises over the show she’s allowed something close to a
‘pretty’ death (at least, for being nearly crucified by glass shards
she looks alright) and it lasts long enough that Sakakibara can talk
to her one last time, resolving some of the relationship between
them, which had been a fairly complex interplay of chemistry and
rivalry. Taking a breath in the middle of the climax highlights her
fall just right, and both the image and the emotion of the scene have
stuck with me.
The climax is great, but the twist, not
so much. I wouldn’t normally harp on this, but Another does come off
as a mystery as well as a horror thanks to the pacing of the majority
of the show. As a horror twist, the Extra being Sakakibara’s aunt
and the TA works pretty well. As a mystery solution… not so much.
There were a couple clues that something wasn’t alright about the
aunt, but despite it being something obvious to our main character
there were really no good clues connecting the aunt with the TA,
which kind of invalidates the hints about the aunt. So I guess I
half liked it. Especially in a mystery, a good twist should be
something that makes you look back and say “That makes so much
sense! I should have seen it!” You don’t see it, but you feel
like it’s something you could have seen. Another’s ending gets it
half right, but doesn’t quite get there. I don’t demand that every
twist adhere to the rules of a Fair-Play Mystery, especially not in
the realm of supernatural horror, but I wanted just a little more,
especially when it feels like Another is abusing the perspective of
the viewer that would normally be party to Sakakibara’s knowledge.
But okay, that really is a minor quibble
How does Another hold up over all? It’s not great, and it could have been a lot better. In one early scene, Sakakibara is seen reading the Complete Works of HP Lovecraft, and while the progression and pacing of Another feels somewhat Lovecraftian (many of his stories featuring lengthy stretches of buildup, priming the air with faint eeriness before anything truly horrific actually makes an appearance), it’s clearly the diet alternative, short on the big ideas and phantasmagorical wonder that make Lovecraft one of my favorite authors. Another’s heart is in the right place, but it sets its sights fairly low, again with the exceptions of the umbrella death and the climax, so it can’t quite get top marks. I give it a solid B, and would recommend it if you’re at all interested, just not as anything truly amazing.