On Daisuke Miyazaki's Videophobia (2019)

Videophobia (2019) by Daisuke Miyazaki is a subtle thriller and silent horror--this term does not refer to being without dialogues, it is just the fact that the horror is not actually embodied or materialized similar to typical horror movies--movie to which every woman is very rightful to be scared and anxious about. The protagonist of the movie, Ai, works as a mascot during the day, attends acting classes in the evening—which will be further discussed later—and hangs out with her friends at night. Ai is not particularly content with the way she is leading her life, and black and white cinematography can be read as her discontent, unhappiness, and unfulfilled life. During one of these nights, Ai hooks up with a stranger she meets at the club and ends up having a one-night stand with the stranger. Some time later, while browsing through a porn website she encounters her sex tape with the stranger she hooked up with, which signals the rising action of the movie.

While in the same rising action arc of the movie, she discovers that another two videos were also uploaded from different angles, which results in her gradually becoming hysterical, anxious, and paranoid. The stranger she met previously claimed that the house actually belonged to him but, in reality, the house was rented out on Airbnb (Ai, and the audience, learn that when Ai goes out to confront the stranger in his house though he is nowhere to be found).

At this point in the movie, the audience can experience a weird sensation in the cinematography of the movie: the camera starts to shake hysterically whenever Ai is in the scene or she is presented with a tense situation/encounter. In the scenes she is not present this is not the case, however. The rattling of the camera might be read as an ingenious method of reflecting the tenseness, anxiety level, or heartbeat of Ai. 

It would also be convenient here and now to mention Ai’s concealed identity under the guise of a rabbit costume, the job she performs in the morning times. Even before the release of the sex tape her being occupied in this line of the job can be read as a foreshadowing of the later stages of the movie, in which she would actually have to hide herself from the world because of the guilt and shame she feels as well as insecurity and fear. After she has been exposed, we see that she has become extremely sensitive to phones and cameras, and her nose actually bleeds after her photo is taken by a bystander. The nose bleeding incident reflects her PTSD as well as a subtle reference to Jordan Peele’s 2017 movie Get Out. 

We mentioned the rising action arc of the movie, waiting for the climax to ensue soon after though it never really comes about. Skipping the climax, the movie continues slowly toward its falling action with Ai getting plastic surgery to utterly and entirely run away from her previous life. In the acting classes at the beginning of the movie, the acting instructor emphasized the notion of being someone else rather than being yourself in the acting world, and Ai seriously took notice of the instructions. Her new life after the plastic surgery still seems mundane and unfulfilled, however, she is free from the shackles of online exposure and insecurity. It is something that is reminiscent of Kim Wexler’s new life in the TV drama Better Call Saul’s last season. 

Throughout the movie, you expect something big, something impactful or destructive to happen though it never does. It is as if the silence, emptiness, and stagnation are the real horrors within the movie which force us to contemplate about the ever-present dangers of technology and our presence in a globalized, digitalizing world. Exposure and sharing yourself/being shared by someone else on the internet seems to be nightmare-inducing if they were to be posted without our consent or knowledge, no matter in which context you are captured. This, in turn, might actually start to be an actual everyday problem for human beings, the extreme digitalization of the world, and it might bring about technophobia in every single individual on planet Earth, similar to that of Videophobia’s protagonist Ai.