Miki (Motola Serena) is a 27-year old woman working for an architectural firm who believes she has been bitten by a wolf during her lunch hour. Wolves, of course, have been extinct in Japan for over 120 years and she has no visible bite marks so her work mates remain appropriately skeptical, even as Miki begins to experience a series of dream memories that transform her self-image and cause her to question reality.
For her Fantasia program capsule Justine Smith writes: “The film has a languid numbness; a strange rhythm that’s both uncomfortable and infectious. Viewers who allow themselves to be carried into Miki’s mind will soon find themselves pulled into one of the most unique werewolf stories ever put to the big screen.” But there you have it. Viewers who allow themselves to be languidly numbed by When You Open the Door have to also be willing to suspend their disbelief and that’s a heavy lift for this anemic fare.
That is, if you really want this to be a werewolf movie. Then again, belief or disbelief might not have anything to do with it. Maybe this film should simply be accepted as werewolf-lite, a unique interpretation of the genre that borrows some of the tropes—hairy transformation, blackouts, howling at the moon—and imagines them differently than expected? Filtering them through a lens of feminine isolation? And resulting in as kitty-like a werewolf as Dee Wallace’s transformation at the end of The Howling (1981), cute and fuzzy, eating lit-up heart-shaped hearts. Believability ends up not really being the focus after all as the film’s final lip-licking wink conclusively asserts. Less for gore fans, this film is dedicated to all the furries out there with struggling identity issues.
The film’s most interesting thread revolves around Japan’s deep history of female shamans, seers, and spirit mediums known as itako or orgamisama in northern folk traditions. To become mediums women are trained in caves, essentially animal graveyards, where they undergo fasting, sleep deprivation, and are beaten with reeds to achieve trance states. Once trained, they are initiated in a god-possession ritual where the old women surround the novice and chant. Though these traditions aren’t directly associated with wolves, there is a canine connection that Katagiri incorporates into her narrative: that of a secret box called a gehōbako which contains magical items.
