Ghost Town review – the phantoms and lost souls haunting a Japanese city after the 2011 earthquake — SkimNews
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- Ghost Town follows taxi drivers working nocturnal shifts in tsunami-hit Kamaishi on Japan's east coast, with passengers steering conversation back to the 2011 earthquake and tsunami through themes of grief, loss and absence.
- Katharine Round directed the British documentary, which the review likens to Ryūsuke Hamaguchi's Drive My Car for the way the journeying opens passengers up to greater intimacy.
- Taxi drivers in Kamaishi claim to have picked up phantom fares that later vanished from the back seat, and one taxi rank veteran says he saw spectres crowding into a phone booth one night after the disaster, as if trying to call for help to get home.
- A driver recounts a dream of a drowning white horse, while in another dream a passenger warns him not to take a road that was later submerged — the review treats the subconscious as an early warning system.
- Skeptical drivers question whether the supernatural is real and whether they can truly see the revenants, yet one devout driver insists the apparitions are "messengers from God," and the film finds deer picking through hillside cemeteries and glimpsed at the roadside.
- Shiori Itō, a journalist and outsider to Kamaishi, supplies the film's main narrative thread and coaxes out more personal histories, including one driver's youth as a local thug and another's gambling and carousing.
- Kamaishi appears as a kind of living mausoleum not only because of the tsunami but also in the context of superannuated Japan, with most of the featured drivers and passengers of a certain age bemoaning the lack of young people.
Why it matters: The film's most pointed material is demographic: the same drivers who carry Kamaishi's ghosts also lament the shortage of young people, so the 2011 tsunami's unprocessed loss becomes inseparable from Japan's aging. For Round's subjects, the night shift serves as a confessional, and the departed materialize among the elderly left behind.
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