Three Faces, One Mess
Tomie: Another Face isn’t really a movie—it’s three episodes of a TV series duct-taped together and sold as a feature. Imagine binge-watching a half-baked soap opera with the occasional stabbing, then realizing someone thought it was scary enough to release on VHS. The title is misleading: this isn’t Another Face, it’s the same face, recycled three times with slightly different boyfriends, the same jealous stares, and the inevitable “oops, Tomie can’t die” ending. If Junji Ito’s manga is existential dread on paper, this film is a Xerox copy smeared with grease.
Runa Nagai: Beauty Without Terror
Runa Nagai plays Tomie Kawakami, the immortal femme fatale cursed to inspire obsession, jealousy, and murder wherever she goes. On the page, Tomie is chilling—her beauty is inhuman, her cruelty bottomless. In this film, she looks like she wandered off the set of a shampoo commercial. She’s perfectly pretty, yes, but about as terrifying as a mall mannequin. Tomie isn’t supposed to be “that girl from chemistry class who’s kind of mean”; she’s supposed to be the embodiment of destructive vanity. Nagai smiles, flips her hair, and occasionally gaslights men, but she never radiates the supernatural allure needed to make the story work.
Episode One: High School Musical (But With Murders)
The first act feels like a melodramatic teen drama where everyone’s hormones are turned up to eleven and their brains set to “off.” Tomie is killed by her boyfriend Takashi, only to pop back up at school the next day as if nothing happened. His ex, Miki, stares wide-eyed, shocked that the girl she literally buried is now casually walking the hallways. The drama escalates into rooftop struggles, more accidental murder, and—you guessed it—Tomie standing around smirking like a cat who just hacked up a ghostly hairball. It’s meant to be disturbing. Instead, it plays like a live-action anime club skit gone horribly long.
Episode Two: The Photographer’s Bad Angles
Then we shift to Mori, a depressed photographer who’s never gotten over the girl of his youth. Surprise! That girl is Tomie, because Tomie apparently doubles as Japan’s least efficient vampire, haunting one sad man at a time. He spends a day photographing her, falls in love, and naturally ends up strangling her when she gets too weird. It’s here we get the film’s one halfway creepy image: every photo of Tomie develops with a second face, a monstrous one glaring beside her. For a moment, you see what Ito’s horror is supposed to be: beauty so perfect it curdles into something grotesque. But then the movie tosses it away in favor of Nagai standing around pouting, and Mori dies by tripping off a cliff like a clumsy tourist. Horror cinema at its finest.
Episode Three: Engagement Ring of Doom
Finally, Tomie toys with Yasuda, a lovesick fool who proposes after a month of dating. Clearly this man deserves to be eaten alive by eldritch beauty. They’re interrupted by Oota, the one-eyed coroner whose life was ruined after Tomie revived on his autopsy table. He’s the only character with an actual reason to want Tomie destroyed, but instead of driving the story, he wanders around like a weary substitute teacher warning kids not to run in the hall. When he finally incinerates Tomie, it almost feels like closure—until her ashes start forming a face and she promises to never die. You don’t feel dread. You feel exhausted, like the film just threatened you with sequels.
Horror That Forgets to Horrify
Junji Ito’s manga thrives on repetition—Tomie is killed, returns, ruins more lives, again and again. But in comic form, that looping inevitability is terrifying. In Another Face, the repetition feels like a rerun marathon nobody asked for. The violence is tame, the gore minimal, and the supernatural elements half-hearted. The scariest thing about this movie is how many times men willingly agree to date Tomie after she’s already crawled out of a grave. By the third act, you’re screaming at the screen—not from fear, but from sheer frustration.
The Men Are Idiots
Speaking of the men: wow, are they dumb. Takashi kills Tomie in a fit of jealousy, then acts shocked when she strolls back into his life. Mori ignores glaring supernatural warning signs because she giggled at his photography. Yasuda proposes after 30 days, then folds like wet paper when asked to stab someone. Instead of a terrifying portrait of male obsession, the film plays like a cautionary tale about dating guys with zero self-preservation instincts.
Production Values: VHS at Its Worst
Visually, the movie looks like it was filmed on leftover camcorders from a high school AV club. The lighting is flat, the sets are uninspired, and the editing is clumsy. Even the few special effects—the double-faced photos, the ashes forming Tomie’s grin—look like they were slapped together with Microsoft Paint. This isn’t Gothic horror. It’s public-access soap opera with a spooky filter.
What’s Missing?
Everything that makes Ito terrifying: the uncanny beauty, the grotesque body horror, the sense of dread that comes from knowing you can’t escape. Another Face replaces it all with dull dialogue, limp performances, and a plot stitched together like Frankenstein’s B-roll. Tomie is supposed to be both irresistible and horrifying, a perfect face masking bottomless corruption. Here, she’s just kind of rude and very hard to kill. That’s not horror. That’s an annoying roommate.
The Only Scary Thing: The Runtime
At 90-ish minutes, Another Face feels twice as long. Each episode promises tension, then delivers filler until the final five minutes. The pattern becomes predictable: Tomie seduces someone, manipulates them, dies, and comes back with a smirk. Repeat. By the time the credits roll, you feel like you’ve been buried and resurrected right alongside her, only less glamorous and way more tired.
Final Curse
Tomie: Another Face is proof that not every manga deserves a quick-and-dirty adaptation. Instead of channeling Ito’s unique brand of cosmic dread, it turns Tomie into a soap opera diva whose superpower is being mildly inconvenient to men. It’s not scary, it’s not stylish, and it’s barely coherent. If every speck of Tomie’s ash becomes a new Tomie, then every copy of this VHS should’ve been burned to save future viewers the pain.
Verdict: A horror icon reduced to daytime TV energy. Tomie deserves terror; we got tedium.
