#168: Dogra Magra
Japanese psychological thriller from the twisted mind that gave us Shura
This review was originally posted to Twitter on August 25, 2019.
Initial release: February 20, 1988
Director: Toshio Matsumoto
The mind is a dangerous thing. Memory can betray us, identity can be fleeting or even ephemeral, and in the wrong hands our own brains can be turned against us. Welcome to the obscure but brilliant Japanese brainfuck that is Toshio Matsumoto’s Dogra Magra.
It’s 1926. A young man wakes up in an insane asylum with no memory of who he is, where he is or why he’s there. He’s told that he murdered his fiance, went insane as a result, and lost his memory entirely — and yet he doesn’t quite believe he’s the guilty party.
The problem is that the two doctors on his case seem to have some fairly radical ideas about the underlying motive for his crime — namely, that something triggered a genetic memory of a 9th-century ancestor who killed his wife as an artistic stunt. But what, why and how?
Making matters worse is that when the film begins, one of the doctors had killed himself a month prior. But when the other doctor leaves the room, the heretofore deceased psychologist appears — apparently the other doctor was lying. Maybe. Maybe they’re both lying. Maybe.
It’s almost impossible to rely on anything as gospel truth in this film. Chronologically this film is all over the place as it covers the protagonist’s relationship with his mother, her murder, the murder of his fiance a few years later, so on and so forth. We also can’t take for granted anything about the doctors. Or, in fact, the hospital. Or the main character’s memories. It’s as if the entire movie has been shattered, much like the main character’s identity. Twists pile on twists until it’s all tangled up like a nest of snakes.
Much like Matsumoto’s bleakly dark samurai crime flick Shura from the early 70s, Dogra Magra is a dialogue-heavy slow burn that little by little peels back the onion, gradually escalating until the finale, where things take a sharp turn into bonkers territory. If you haven’t been paying attention, you can be caught off guard very easily.
Dogra Magra was based on a book written by Yumeno Kyūsaku in 1935; in that context, we can see how the theme of identity crisis can relate to questions of Japanese identity in the Imperial era after a period of rapid industrialization and recognition on the world stage. If one considers the central theme of how science can be used to harm someone — in this case, psychologists playing mind games as a psychological experiment — it’s easy to draw a direct line to concerns about Japan’s rapid adoption and development of new technologies after centuries of being a feudal, agricultural nation living in isolation, while equally rapidly adopting the cruelty and brutality of the western imperial states that Japan sought to emulate. The film, however, is half a century removed from that period, yet it too can be seen as a commentary on the Japan of the 80s, when the nation was again in transition — this time from the “post-war” Japan that gave the world Nintendo and Walkman, into the Japan facing an economic collapse.
Japan’s fixation on its history can be seen in the central premise of an ancestor’s crimes echoing throughout time to be repeated once again in the modern day. (The fact that said ancestor was Chinese and migrated to Japan adds another wrinkle, given Japan’s cultural history.)
Of course, all this is academic, fodder for textbooks. It’s interesting stuff to think about, but the core of the film is sound, however bonkers the movie itself is — this is a story about identity, and how and why we are what we are, and do what we do. And just as its dark, ambiguous ending tells us nothing and explains nothing, we pretty much have to come up with the answers to our own identity ourselves as well.
