Reincarnation

In 1970, Omori records himself committing a brutal slaughter of eleven people at a local hotel, including guests, staff, and his own children. He then dies by his own hand, leaving behind a chilling piece of footage. The act is meticulous and ceremonial, intended to probe what lies beyond death. The footage dissolves into ether and vanishes from memory, sparking a quiet puzzle for future generations.

Immediately after the act, the recorded footage dissolves and vanishes from memory, leaving no enduring record of what happened. The mystery surrounding Omori’s crime deepens as the past seems to erase itself. Witnesses are left with only rumors and fear of what truly occurred that night.

Thirty-five years later, horror filmmaker Ikuo Matsumura resolves to make a film about the massacre. He assembles a crew and begins planning shoots, driven by a desire to illuminate the forgotten event. The project starts to echo the past, hinting that cinema may awaken shadows better left buried.

As production approaches, Nagisa Sugiura, cast to portray Omori’s daughter Chisato, begins to suffer nightmare-haunted nights and unsettling hallucinations. The visions blur lines between fiction and the massacre, deepening a creeping sense of dread. The boundary between the on-set world and the past grows dangerously thin.

Yayoi Kinoshita, drawn into the project, encounters Yuka Morita, another actress who claims memories from a past life and shows a birthmark echoing signs of strangulation. The two women sense a living echo of the victims and feel the film’s reach extending beyond fiction. Their meeting amplifies the sense that something older and more malevolent watches from behind the camera.

Ayumi Omori, the massacre’s lone survivor and Omori’s wife, explains that the body is a vessel that can be emptied and reused after death. Her testimony adds a chilling layer to the myth surrounding the killings and hints at why the film’s cast might be drawn to forces they don’t fully understand. The past thus begins to breathe through living memory.

As filming progresses, Nagisa’s agent reviews Omori’s camera and discovers a looping reel that reenacts events in real time. When the film begins to play, the performers seem to step into the roles they portray, and the people she sees begin transforming into those roles before her eyes. The perspective grows increasingly unreliable and claustrophobic as the past infiltrates the present.

With the loop active, the cast drifts into their on-screen personas, and the victims drift toward Nagisa in the real world. The town and set become a dark stage where past horrors intrude on present lives. The line between cinema and the supernatural seems dangerously thin.

Cornered in a climactic sequence, Nagisa seizes a shard of glass and flees through the town, glimpsing Omori’s face reflected in a shop window rather than his own. The agent watches, increasingly unsettled, as events unfold from Omori’s perspective. The pursuit marks a turning point where killer and victim threaten to swap places.

Inside the shop, a malevolent doll utters a chilling claim: they will be together forever. The haunting intensifies as objects around Nagisa seem to carry the past into the present. The boundary between film prop and living spirit blurs in a palpable, unnerving way.

Behind the scenes, executives review Nagisa’s performance as the production races toward completion. Ayumi, the survivor, sits among them, her presence a grim reminder of the history being reanimated. Tension rises as the footage and past crimes exert their influence on the crew.

Nagisa collapses in fear, and crew members restrain her in a full-body wrap inside a mental ward. Ayumi appears at the door, offering the red ball and a doll—the same objects tied to the children’s memories. The scream echoes as ghosts close in, leaving a haunting image of possession and memory.