Never After Dark review – ghostbuster-for-hire meets her match in Japanese exorcism horror

If you watched this Japanese-language ghost-story horror thriller cold, you might be a little surprised that the credits reveal that the director is one Dave Boyle – and not someone from Japan, so steeped is it in Japanese lore and culture. It turns out that Boyle has been interested in Japan for a long time, and even wrote, directed and starred in the 2006 feature film Big Dreams Little Tokyo, about an American sharing a flat with an aspiring sumo wrestler.

More recently, Boyle was a key director-producer for the Netflix series House of Ninjas, and Never After Dark seems to have evolved as a spun-off side hustle between Boyle and Ninjas star Kento Kaku, who produced it and takes a supporting role.

That all goes a little way to explain how this ends up feeling like a larky, low-stakes, one-for-funsies exercise – inventive and full of charm even if the scares are sort-of predictable.

Shogun’s Moeka Hoshi stars as Airi, a young woman who looks like a hipster with her torn jeans and raggedy haircut and who travels the country in her Volvo as an itinerant ghostbuster for hire. The ghost of Airi’s dead older sister Miku (Kurumi Inagaki) is always by her side but is only visible in mirrors (as per folklore), and is available to give advice about imminent danger and vibes in the spirit world.

Airi’s latest gig is to exorcise a spirit haunting what used to be a hotel in the sticks. New proprietor Teiko (Tae Kimura) has been hearing bumps in the night and getting creepy phone calls that are either from spirits or perverts, or possibly both. Teiko’s son Gunji (Kaku) is less convinced there’s a supernatural explanation but he takes a shine to Airi all the same, especially when it is revealed that they share a taste for niche music.

Soon Airi works out that the apparition wandering the corridors and scrabbling at the wainscoting is a man with a gruesomely smashed jaw (Mutsuo Yoshioka), and she can interact with him on the astral plane via a ritual involving a candle, burnt offerings of her own hair (thus the shaggy hairstyle), and a phenakistoscope, a 19th-century persistence-of-vision toy, which in this case depicts a spirit rising from a body. But getting the smashed-mouth spirit out of the house proves to be anything but the run-of-the-mill exorcism Airi expected.

Boyle and his collaborators deploy charmingly old-school physical effects, the sort of thing actual phenakistoscope users might have been impressed by in films by the likes of Georges Méliès. It’s mostly a matter of camera angles capturing faces in mirrors and reflections, wire work and well choreographed use of body doubles. The old school vibe makes this particularly endearing, even if the characterisation isn’t especially complex or nuanced, but Hoshi brings a spontaneity and intelligence to the lead role that is consistently winning.