Alone, lost and somewhat frightened, a little boy wanders a darkening forest, when he hears a tinkling chime. This is the sound made by Keita Kodama (Sugita Rairu), a volunteer rescuer who carries a little bell to frighten off bears, and who is delighted now to have found young Shohei.

Yet even though this is the opening sequence of Ryoto Kondo’s J-horror, Shohei is not the missing boy of its title, and indeed there is no videotape in this scene. Rather this is an eerie echo of a previous incident from the time when Keita himself was a little boy, and when his own even younger brother Minamoto (Ruri), playing hide and seek with him in a strange abandoned building on a mountain, went missing. Once Keita raised the alarm, neither Minamoto, nor indeed the building, could be found – but many years later, shortly after rescuing Shohei, Keita receives by post from his mother the old VHS videotape that he had recorded of the incident, and with his clairvoyant flatmate Tsukasa Amano (Hirai Amon) tailing along, he follows a trail of not quite coherent clues all leading him back to the mountain in search of his brother. Meanwhile local journalist Mikoto Hisazumi (Morita Kokoro), assigned to write an article on Shohei’s rescuer, finds herself also drawn to the mountain and its elusive building in pursuit of Keita’s unfinished story.

Perhaps the most striking thing about Missing Child Videotape is the near silence of its soundtrack. In the very few moments when there is a musical score, it is so subdued as to be almost subliminal. Instead there is mostly an auditory emptiness, interrupted only by the characters’ dialogue and occasional intradiegetic sounds – and that emptiness, unassuming and unflashy, is readily associated with realism, so that the surrealism of later scenes creeps up on the viewer. The visuals too, whether ‘objective’ or found footage, frame the film’s ordinary environments as haunted zones of negative space, so that we are constantly left to scan the darkness for a presence that we somehow sense rather than see – and when the phantoms and spirits do manifest, they are always blurred, or partly out of shot.

Accordingly these three characters’ triangulating ghost hunt is built not of the jump scares that typify Hollywood and sometimes Japanese horror, but instead of ascending dread, and of a spatiotemporal irrationality that ever so gradually intrudes upon the film’s unfussy, minimalist style. Co-writing with Suzuyuki Kaneko, Kondo crafts a paranormal paradox whose closest analogues are the cursed video of Hideo Nakata’s Ring (1998) and especially the quiet apocalypse of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse (2001), while its leaping, looping use of time recall the Ju-on series whose writer/director Takashi Shimizu serves here as executive producer. By the end, we too are made to feel alone, lost and somewhat frightened, as the different threads of Missing Child Videotape intersect in impossible ways, catching some of the characters forever in a disorienting narrative labyrinth whose very recording is part of its trap.

Missing Child Videotape screened at MOTELX, 2025.;