The U.S. distribution of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s films are never guaranteed, so when one comes our way, we’ll take it however it arrives. His ghost story Daguerrotype, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last fall, will get a VOD release next month, on November 7, and now a new trailer has landed.
Starring Tahar Rahim, Constance Rousseau, and Olivier Gourmet, the story follows a daguerreotype photographer’s assistant who falls in love with his employer’s daughter and things get more mysterious therein. See the trailer below, following an excerpt from our review:
Kiyoshi Kurosawa has ways of making it look easy, even unimpressive. To my knowledge, he has never made a film that’s less than a pleasure to simply observe, richly detailed in environment and carefully calibrated in composition, cutting, and gesture — masterclasses too focused on feeling (excitement, mystery, romance, and, most often, terror) to pronounce great pretensions. The latest (and first French-language) entry into his filmography, Daguerrotype, doesn’t stand with the Japanese auteur’s greatest work, nor as much of a great work in total, but it’s one we shouldn’t take for granted, in large part because it manages to strike the most elusive of moods: admirably boring.
Jean (Tahar Rahim), a young Parisian with few skills and even fewer prospects, seems an unlikely candidate for assistant to famed photographer Stéphane (Olivier Gourmet), an obsessive perfectionist living in isolation since his wife’s unexpected death. Yet he soon finds himself in his new employer’s vast, decaying mansion, helping to create life-sized daguerrotypes so vivid they seem almost to contain some portion of their subjects’ souls.
Their model is most often Stéphane’s daughter and muse, Marie (Constance Rousseau), and as she and Jean fall in love they realize they must hatch a plot to leave Stéphane’s haunted world forever. But is there something malevolent within the massive daguerrotypes that will prevent their escape? From acclaimed Japanese master Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Cure, Pulse), comes Daguerrotype, a classic ghost story bent through the lens of one of the most singular horror visionaries at work today.
Daguerrotype hits VOD on November 7.