There's a feeling of otherworldliness and something truly alien in Akihiro Higuchi's directorial debut which feels uniquely Japanese, belonging to a subgenre of J-horror which plays on feelings of loneliness and desolation, for instance the underrated ghost film Pulse. Higuchi elevates the level of strangeness in Spiral by making the existential threat which consumes the residents of a small Japanese town the vortex patterns of the title, which exert a hypnotic influence on their victims who become increasingly - and increasingly bizarrely - obsessed with the shape. Even the corpses which start to pile up throughout the town reflect their encounters with the strange spiral forms. Spiral's relatively low score of 54% on Rotten Tomatoes is certainly a reflection of the polarising nature of very weird movies, and while it perhaps isn't as scary as it thinks it is, the inventive visuals and establishment of mood makes it a worthy entry to Japanese horror cinema.
