Marebito

Masuoka becomes obsessed with fear after witnessing a man kill himself in a terrifying moment. He begins carrying a camera everywhere and longs to understand the emotion behind such terror. This fixation drives him toward the dangerous underground world beneath Tokyo.

Masuoka descends into a labyrinthine network of tunnels beneath Tokyo, stumbling upon stark white quadrupedal humanoids that whimper like dogs. A homeless man living in the tunnels warns him about the deros and the dangers of exploring further. The claustrophobic environment begins to feel like a doorway to another reality.

Within the underground, Masuoka meets Kuroki, who talks about the underworld and The Shaver Mystery. They reflect on fear as something buried in the subconscious that logic cannot fully explain. The dialogue deepens Masuoka's fixation, nudging him toward action.

Masuoka discovers an underground mountain range and the ruins of a city, where he finds a nude young woman chained to a wall. He calls her 'F' and, moving by curiosity more than care, brings her back to his apartment. This illicit rescue marks the start of his disturbing experiments to uncover what makes F tick.

F does not eat, drink, or speak and has strangely formed toes and sharp teeth, suggesting she is not human. Masuoka installs cameras so he can observe her from his cell phone when he leaves the apartment. His fascination hardens into a caretaker obsession as he watches her from afar.

While shopping, Masuoka sees F speaking to someone off camera, and a menacing man in black appears behind him. A payphone rings with a warning that he is in serious trouble. He returns home to find twelve seconds of camera footage missing, deepening the sense that unseen forces are watching him.

Masuoka is beaten by a stranger he had filmed, and he cuts his finger on the broken lens to feed F. He learns that F survives on blood and begins supplying her with animal carcasses. His behavior shifts from researcher to caregiver as he treats F as a pet rather than a person.

A woman in a trench coat confronts Masuoka on the street, insisting that the girl is her daughter Fuyumi and demanding to know where she is. He denies having a daughter and runs home, only to find the lock broken and F missing. He later encounters the man in black again, who speaks to him telepathically with the same voice heard on the payphone.

F returns with bloody hands, and Masuoka confronts the trench coat woman as she presses him. He begins filming again and stabs her to death on camera, draining her blood to feed F. F drinks eagerly from baby bottles, showing a disturbing feeding ritual between them.

Masuoka lures a high school girl to a park at night under the pretense of filming amateur pornography and kills and films her. He calls the payphone again, and the man in black concedes that Masuoka is taking better care of F. The violence pushes him deeper into his perverse obsession.

During a shoot with a news crew at the scene of the second murder, Masuoka sees the murdered girl standing beside the crime scene and glaring at him. He leads F out of the apartment and abandons her in a karaoke room before boarding a train with no destination.

Weeks after the karaoke incident, Masuoka meets Kuroki again in an onsen town and they discuss fear as primal knowledge. He returns to Tokyo, living among the homeless in the park, briefly admitting that he murdered his wife and a stranger and treated his daughter like an animal. He sees deros on the street and finds a cell phone showing his own terror-stricken face. Back at the apartment, his wife’s ghost appears as he feeds F, and she finally speaks; Masuoka cuts his tongue to feed her and the two descend back into the underworld, where F films him, suggesting he has finally understood the fear that drew him in.