For many film viewers, Ishiro Honda’s legacy rests almost entirely on one film. More populist than the Japanese masters like Ozu or Mizoguchi, less frenetic and frazzled than, say, Seijun Suzuki, and more sober and sophisticated, and thus more chaste, than the exploitation pictures riding in his wake in the 1970s, his films, eminently corporate in their way, can be parsimonious in doling out satisfaction for auteurists looking for the trademark stamp of a recalcitrant, personal touch. Functionally, this means that his straight-and-narrow sensibilities sometimes flatten his oeuvre out for an audience who mostly remember his epochal 1954 celestial howl Gojira and forget that the man who unleashed that scathing, wounded critique on the world had a career lasting several decades. While his style was more streamlined than many other concurrent Japanese directors, Matango serves him well: it boils down his populist horror sensibilities to the bone, perhaps because it is about the streamlining of humanity into a smooth paste of consumerist pulp. While Gojira lets the blood run raw, demanding to be witnessed in all its sublime monstrousness, Matango cauterizes the wound, slowing things way down for examination. And then it picks at the scab. It simmers down the former’s cosmic canvas of international panic for a seven-person cast waywardly trapped on a forgotten island of the soul.

Released a decade after Gojira, Matango depicts a recovering Japan, or one that never actually bothered to ask what genuine recovery would mean. It begins with a newly resurgent, distinctly modern bourgeoisie, twenty years on from the war and, apparently, relatively untroubled by and weathered from the immediate shock of absolute destruction. Although we know, beforehand, who the designated “survivor” of this story is, there’s little sense in which psychology professor Kenji Murai (Akira Kubo) is a protagonist, other than being slightly more level-headed than the other characters, all of whom, finally, prove susceptible to the call of another life beyond the one humanity has made for itself. Each, in their way, is entirely amenable to the siren song of a scientific homogeneity that presents itself as a radical otherization but, in fact, simply marks the blasé hollowness they’ve already accepted as their daily livelihood.

Honda’s film is, if not a deeper treatment of collective miasma than his vastly more famous Gojira, at least as attentive to the cataclysmic vibrations of mid-century culture, the sense that we’ve wandered into a realm beyond the pale of reason and into a dark crevice where humanity will be unalterably transformed. Gojira implies that danger is eminently present, immanently occurrent, and sublimely difficult to grasp, let alone to account for. Matango offers a vision of scientific experimentation and social decay that creeps on the margins and writhes on the outskirts of a society that isn’t trying too hard to bolster itself against them. The mushroom men at the core of this film’s horror are deeply appealing to those in search of an even more streamlined lifestyle vaguely overlaid with the patina of non-committal adventure. The seven people in the story, on a boat tour off the coast of Japan, are milquetoast middle-class types who see the island they discover as a temporary amusement, not a genuine part of the world. But as the island refuses to remain passive, their day trip of the damned also becomes a clarification of their souls.

Consequently, the mushroom men expose themselves calmly, as a quotidian release, not brutal, clarifying shocks but unsuspecting realizations that only confirm what was already true. The scene in which the mushroom men simply appear, less like a jump scare than a background element we slowly attune to and habituate toward, suggests their intoxicant appeal and their banality, that the humans who should be afraid of them really aren’t so different after all. Indeed, the most frightening image in the film is its first one:  the opening cityspace as a teeming colony of digital futurist spores, an ecology that is already malevolent even before any mushrooms mark their presence. When the opening credits intrude with insidious boatsails protruding into the frame, their triangularity is a kind of everyday malevolence that make the mushrooms far more comforting, and thus more troubling: a soft, organic refuge from modernity that also fulfills modernity’s inner compulsion toward sameness.

Fittingly, Honda’s style is deviously minimalist. The actual story remains cryptic, and the origins of the mushroom men are fascinatingly opaque. We learn that there have been Western, Socialist, and Japanese scientists on the island, but whether these were successive efforts, a gruesome palimpsest of one country taking up the task after the death of the former’s efforts, or one surreptitious worldwide conspiracy, remains unclear. If this was a scientific effort at transcendence, the script suggests it was only another gruesome attempt to actualize imperial globalism and worldly uniformity that these Westernized Japanese characters seem more or less pliant for. The script thus indicates an atypically utopian sort of slippage into the abyss, not only to man-made destruction but another form of geopolitical transcendence of particularity. Fulfilling and failing the self are fully entangled here: becoming something new is also projected as a death long in the making.  

Thornily, Matango suggests both a conservative apprehension about burgeoning socialist collectivism and a view of consumer capitalism as already debasing society and debilitating freedom far more seriously than any leftism ever could. I was particularly fond of Hiroshi Tachikawa’s emptied-out performance of milquetoast giddiness, suggesting not abject horror but comatic ease, a perversion of middle-class luxury. The film’s vision of blasé terror suggests unhurried decay, hardly a mass clearing but a slow growth from the inside, one that you know you are imbibing, but have decided is worth the death of your personality.

The film slips occasionally. The finale renders all too literal in dialogue what had been already apparent in the film’s subtext, and the performances are generally more textured the more frayed and battered the characters get, which can make the early portions slow goings. But Matango is an unusually curious vision of Japanese horror, a critique of conformity that gives even the film’s most styleless passages a critical edge. While Onibaba and Kuroneko and Kwaidan remain the torchbearers of mid-century Japan weaponizing its folklore as parables of an ambivalent modernity, Matango achieves its own iridescent ethereality through its simplicity, channeling a middle-of-the-road cinematic gut-punch into a withering vision of the social search for conventionality.

Score: 7.5./10