At The Movies: Haunting ghost story Ring Wandering; Notre-Dame On Fire reconstructs fateful day of fire

Ring Wandering (PG)

104 minutes, opens on Thursday

4 stars

The story: Sosuke (Sho Kasamatsu), an aspiring manga artist, finds an animal skull at his day job excavating a construction site in central Tokyo. He returns that night, hoping for more skeletal fragments to help him complete his long-stalled drawing of an indigenous wolf. Out of the darkness appears an enigmatic young woman (Junko Abe) looking for her runaway dog.

Ring Wandering is an award-winning Japanese fantasy of such naturalism, so quiet in its intent, the viewer is as unaware as Sosuke when he is transported from the present to the 1940s.

The only hints are the girl’s traditional geta sandals and the torii gate – the Shinto portal to the spiritual – he passes to escort her home. Her parents (Ken Yasuda and Reiko Kataoka) invite him to stay for a lip-smacking dinner of pond loach nabe. Alas, the popular war-time hot pot is wasted on Sosuke, who regards it in bewilderment.

The skull has set him on a discovery of his nation’s recent history and is a metaphor for the 100,000 civilian deaths from the 1945 Great Tokyo Air Raid, their bones buried and forgotten under the redeveloped capital.

Also lost is the Japanese wolf he has been struggling to reimagine for his manga. The species was hunted to extinction during the Meiji-era industrialisation.

Director Masakazu Kaneko will be at The Picturehouse on Sunday for a question-and-answer session after the 3pm screening, but his modest movie makes no grand statement.

The melancholic, ever-mysterious rumination on memory is about just one self-absorbed youth forming emotional connections to the past and gaining wisdom.

Hot take: This ghost story haunts and edifies.

Notre-Dame On Fire (PG13)

110 minutes, opens on Thursday

3 stars

The story: The Notre-Dame of Paris was engulfed in flames on April 15, 2019. French film-maker Jean-Jacques Annaud incorporates actual footage in a dramatisation of the massive operation to rescue the 850-year-old cathedral.

Was it a careless cigarette? Or faulty wiring?

Whatever the cause, the cathedral’s alarm sounded during Easter Monday mass and was dismissed after an inspection of the sacristy – when it was the attic that had caught fire. The Paris Fire Brigade was not alerted until half an hour later, then further delayed by traffic.

Notre-Dame On Fire reconstructs, minute-by-minute, the events of the day beginning with these mishaps that would be farcical had they not converged inevitably towards the dreadful conflagration.

The movie is an Imax disaster adventure in a 1,200 deg C hellfire. The firefighters, the heroes of the story, battle the sizzling embers, blazing beams, stone gargoyles belching molten lead and a collapsing spire to tame the inferno and salvage the relics.

The 1986 mediaeval mystery The Name Of The Rose was Annaud’s international breakthrough, pre-dating The Lover (1992) and Seven Years In Tibet (1997). The director’s appreciation for gothic architecture, and his spatial clarity as rescuers wend their way along spiral stairs 50cm narrow, add greatly to the narrative urgency.

But his docu-drama remains an uneasy mix. The realism of the newsreels and amateur videos come up constantly against his contrived screenplay.

French President Emmanuel Macron’s cameo among all the acted characters is, for the record, genuine. So, too, are the touching scenes of tearful crowds gathered by the Seine in hymn and prayer for Our Lady of Paris.

Hot take: Can any feature film, even one by a veteran director, recreate fully the horror of such a catastrophe?