Kyōfu

Plot

Two neurosurgeons, Etsuko Ōta and her husband, Yukio, watch a 16mm documentary film of a secret experiment with Japanese, Manchu, and Russian subjects concerning the electrification of the temporal lobe of the brain, ending with the subjects projecting a blinding white light. Their children, Miyuki and Kaori, watch the film as well. Years later, a group consisting of Miyuki, Kazushi, Takumi and Rieko, conduct a mass suicide assisted by Etsuko's assistant, Hattori, though it is actually a masquerade for their initiation to a similar neurosurgery experiment conducted by Etsuko. Miyuki wakes up inside a facility to another of Etsuko's assistants, Hisae, who insists that she has died and is currently astral projecting, even presenting her with her corpse as proof. Miyuki and Rieko are later found to have escaped the facility unnoticed.

After having lost contact with her sister for six months, Kaori visits the hospital where Miyuki once worked and meets with Miyuki's fellow worker and lover, Motojima, who introduces her to Detective Hirasawa. Miyuki's laptop contains a suicide website that Miyuki might have used. Hirasawa questions a witness who saw a figure inside Miyuki's apartment after her disappearance. Kaori realizes that she has dreamed of being in Miyuki's apartment and seeing a white light nearby. Miyuki visits Kaori in a dream that night to tell her to stop looking for her and that she is "no longer her sister". Kaori is confronted by Etsuko and taken to the facility to learn about the experiment. Kazushi and Takumi have long since died, unable to contain the experiment. Witnessing how Miyuki has bended realities around her since the experiment, Etsuko conducts the experiment on herself and Kaori, revealing that she and Yukio have always wanted to know the "true" reality beyond the current one to achieve a spiritual evolution, and the film had provided them with the means to it. However, she stops the experiment just when Kaori sees a young Miyuki and herself staring at the white light, apparently because Kaori would have been consumed by it.

The next day, Kaori tells Motojima that her father committed suicide following a neurosurgery failure, while her mother is a skeptic of the afterlife, and believes that there is nothing after death. The two visit Kaori's childhood home and meet with an ethereal Miyuki. It is revealed that Motojima was the one who informed Miyuki of the suicide website and has been in league with Etsuko, who tracks the sisters and kills Hirasawa. All of them go back to the facility with Rieko, now pregnant despite being a virgin. Motojima reveals that Miyuki's corpse is actually a hologram meant to fool her and the other three subjects and she is still very much alive. Motojima shows the film to Kaori and Miyuki, with Etsuko explaining that the white light actually projects what the viewer is dreaming. Yukio wanted to further the spiritual evolution, so the light "followed" him back in reality until he could not take it anymore and killed himself. However, Rieko is suicidal and wants nothing more, so the light impregnated her with the "afterlife", i.e. nothing. Rieko gives birth to the "afterlife", who consumes Hattori and Motojima, while Etsuko is consumed when she experiments herself as well. At the forest, Kaori and Miyuki walk together until Kaori realizes that Miyuki had "died" long ago when she found that she could not fit herself with the world and runs away from her sister.

The film closes with an alive Hirasawa inspecting the bodies of Miyuki, Kazushi, Takumi, Rieko, and Hattori and Kaori lamenting of remains on the ground.

Cast