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Date of release: September 6, 2001
Story / Synopsis:
The endless sea. A cargo ship drifts somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. Its captain tries to make contact with shore, but has no success. The ship has picked up a young woman and man who were drifting in a small boat. The captain asks what happened and she slowly begins to tell her incredible story.
She is MICHI – a typical young Japanese woman about the age of twenty-one. She works for a small company that employs several people her age. They all get along well at work, but aren’t close friends, respecting each other’s privacy and keeping a certain distance from each other. Michi lives alone, but her mother drops by occasionally to make sure she’s doing fine, which Michi finds annoying.
One day, Michi and others in her office desperately try to contact their co-worker Taguchi, who is supposed to be finishing up a business document. He has to comework lately or contacted them. Michi goes to Taguchi’s home to find out what’s going on. She finds him, but he is expressionless. She asks for the floppy disk he’s been working on, but he doesn’t seem to care about anything anymore, so she looks for it herself and finds it, but suddenly hears a dull sound coming form the next room. She rushed in and faces Taguchi hanging from the ceiling. The rope is cut and his body falls with a thud in front of her.
Nobody knows why he committed suicide. Michi’s colleague, Toshi, finds a strange image on Taguchi’s floppy disk. In the monitor, Taguchi’s room is shown containing the same monitor. The image repeats itself endlessly. Taguchi appears in the image, too. His face is rather vague, as if he is not alive anymore. Michi also sees a long-haired woman acting strangely. She puts red rubber tape around every window frame and door of an abandoned factory. When Michi discusses this with a woman at work, the woman explains that this is how a ghost is called. It seems everyone has heard this rumor, but no one knows if it is true. It could just be something somebody made up to frighten people. But why was the image of Taguchi’s room shown on his monitor? And why does he look so much like a ghost?
Ryosuke is a twenty-one-year-old university student – another typical Japanese guy. He lives alone in a small apartment, and joins a university club, even though he’s not really interested in the club’s activities. He just want so feel a connection to people without getting into a deep relationship. He joins the computer group and sets up a computer at home, connecting it to the Internet. Suddenly, the computer runs wild under it’s own power and hits on a website. The monitor shows a dark room, though the image is not clear. A message appears: "Do you want to encounter a ghost?" Ryosuke ignores the site and shut the computer off.
At midnight, while Ryosuke sleeps, the computer turns itself on and shows the very dark room again. A man with a black plastic bag over his head faces the monitor. The wall behind him is covered with the word "HELP". Ryosuke wakes with a start and sees the monitor. The man is about to take the bag off his head when Ryosuke yanks the cable from the computer. What is going on here?
The next day, Ryosuke meets Harue at the university club. She seems to know a lot about computers and is very excited to hear about the strange
website. She asks Ryosuke to find the site again and save its data. Meanwhile, Michi faces all kinds of weird phenomena. One night, the image on her television screen freezes and a news reporter’s face melts. She sees the long-haired woman again standing very still on the roof of a building. The woman jumps and crashes to the ground. Michi’s boss has been acting strange, too, as if he’s addicted to something. He begins putting red rubber tape around a room.
And that’s not all. Michi’s colleague Toshio’s mobile phone rings. When he picks up he hears a strange sound. It is not clear, but Toshio realizes the voice is the dead Taguchi repeating the word "HELP" "HELP" in a low murmur. Toshio looks at this phone and sees Taguchi’s room appearing in the monitor. Working at a home computer, Harue wants to connect to the ghost website, but Shusuke senses something terrible might happen, so he disconnects the cable. Shusuke has special feelings for Harue and doesn’t want her to be in any danger. But she’s already very addicted to the website and studies how she can encounter a ghost.
When Shusuke finds Harue in the university library, he sees strange stains on the wall. He meets a graduate student who tells him the ghost website holds an ultimate danger for people. Nobody knows how it started, but the circuit is now connected. The ghost website will attract people like drugs, and once they start to create a tape-framed room, they will have no choice but to encounter a ghost. Once people see a ghost face-to-face, they either commit suicide, become ghosts themselves, or suffer such extreme terror that they turn into a clump of earth and stay that way forever.
Michi’s co-workers are trapped by this circuit one by one. First, Toshi, next, hiss boss, then Junko. Michi realizes they meant a
lot to her and she wants to be connected to somebody. After losing them, she meets Ryosuke. She tries to escape to another town with him, but he sees Harue’s ghost. He murmurs, "I saw hell." He loses his energy and gets more and more depressed, falling into a deep despair. That place where they live has become a real ghost town – no people, no car, nothing. A huge airplane passes above and crashes into a building. But Michi does not give up. She takes Tyosuke’s hand and gets into a boat with him, saying, "I will not give up, I will save you."
Her story is over. The ship’s captain finally receives an answer from shore and tells Michi to rest a while. She goes back to her cabin and finds a clump of earth on the floor. When she steps out to tell the captain, Ryosuke metamorphosizes. But Michi speaks to the earth softly, saying,
"Don’t worry Ryosuke. Whatever happens to you, I will be next to you all the time."
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