Today’s quick review: Tag. Mitsuko (Reina Triendl), a Japanese teenager, is on a school trip when the rest of her classmates are killed in a freak incident. Fleeing the scene, Mitsuko finds herself in an alternate world where her classmates Aki (Yuki Sakurai), Taeko (Aki Hiraoka), and Sur (Ami Tomite) are alive. But when violence erupts in this new reality, Mitsuko must flee to another one to have any hope of staying alive.
Tag is a Japanese horror movie about a young girl plagued by inexplicable and surreal violence. Mitsuko is thrust into a series of dreamlike scenarios that invariably turn into gory nightmares. The film has a thin plot that consists of Mitsuko bouncing from massacre to massacre with no explanation. The gore is schlocky and laid on thick. Tag has occasional good ideas, but the meaningless nature of the violence makes the movie hard to invest in.
Tag gives the impression that it’s building to some lofty idea that will make sense of the chaos, but no such idea ever appears. The premise would be compatible with a surreal nightmare, repressed memories, or some kind of curse, but the movie is less interested in building to one of these ideas than setting up its next act of violence. The answers that it does eventually dole out are cryptic, belated, and inadequate to explain what came before.
Even taken on its own terms, Tag is a mixed bag. Mitsuko and her friends are fairly likable in the scenes they’re given together. Recurring symbols, themes of choice and fate, and a sense of unspecified guilt all hint at some deeper meaning, even if it never becomes fully apparent. The gore is enough to shock but too gratuitous to take seriously. Tag isn’t so much frightening as it is perplexing, a horror movie that’s more about premise than payoff.
Watch Tag only if you’re a fan of gory horror and surreal, abstract stories. Tag’s weak payoff keeps it from working as a psychological thriller, while its meaningless events keep it from working as a straight violence fantasy. All that it can truly offer is cheap gore and hints at something more. For a violent Japanese action movie with a better plot and more flair, try Battle Royale. For similar themes in an action fantasy package, try Sucker Punch.
6.1 out of 10 on IMDB. I give it a 5.0 for a peculiar premise and mediocre execution.