The Convenience Store
She works the night shift at the LT Store, her colleague Takuya Funabashi who hands over to her disrespectful to the point of rude, presumably feeling he has no-one to answer to with manager Toshiro Tsurukawa having failed to show up again, his ongoing absence reported with no response, Yukino Tazuru working at the convenience store to pay for her college tuition and hoping to send some money to her mother, restocking the shelves and dealing with the strange customers, the elderly woman in the walker who only wishes to use the toilet then vanishes, the homeless man in the alley by the bins who says she will be saved if she gives him food.
But the manager has not just ghosted his employees; venturing into the basement, Yukino finds his body where it has apparently lain for days, his eyes gouged out, police detective Shinji Saruwatari asking if there have been any other strange occurrences in the recent days, Yukino recounting the four personal deliveries she has had at the store, each containing an SD storage card with video footage, of her at work, at home, and of another family who the officer is able to recognise from a murder/suicide with a similar modus operandi dating to 2009, Kazuka Onodera the man who killed his wife and child them himself, stabbing them and removing their eyes.
Its international premiere at FrightFest at the Glasgow Film Festival the same weekend it was the number one box office hit in Japan, The Convenience Store (夜勤事件) is directed by Jirô Nagae, based on the 2020 first-person horror game Night Shift Incident, starring Kotona Minami as Yukino, an innocent who might have been overwhelmed by the incidents but who remains strangely calm as she recounts them, Terunosuke Takezai as Saruwatari, a rational family man who smokes too much from the pressure of his job, exacerbated by this new case, his wife Kaho (Natsuki Kato) making him promise to stop before their child is born.
The scenes within the convenience store mimicking the style of the game, the camera presenting Yukino’s point of view as she shuffles about her duties, stretching tedious tasks to fill the long hours, it is a gimmick which, like found footage, is better when deployed judiciously, here only serving to draw attention to the numerous shortcomings of Yoshimasa Akamatsu’s overly derivative script, the copying of footage to break the curse lifted from Ringu, the illicitly recorded grainy black and white personal footage a hallmark of Lost Highway and the wide-eyed silent child with the bowl-haircut who appears under counters then vanishes, the mystery woman offering amulets of protection and the scary long-haired lady under the bed generic staples of J-horror.
The conclusion being that Japanese ghosts just want to be obscure and annoying for the sake of it, Yukino lacks interest as a protagonist, spinning her wheels rather than driving, with many of the visitations seemingly included for the sake of it, purple Zimmer grandma a character from the game who possibly has more bearing on that narrative but confined to a single appearance here, disjointed weirdness for the sake of it as much as the needlessly sinister delivery driver and Funabashi (Tetta Seki) who has so far been nothing other than indifferent assaulting the air conditioning repair man to teach him a lesson, believing he was Yukino’s stalker, because a stalker’s first action is always to repair the broken air conditioning unit.
That the archive police file on Onodera (Chiharu Mizuno) carries a standard police mug shot – was he arrested previously? – as inexplicable as Yukino’s claim she was delayed by a suicide which she then says was a lie – why? and why? – the shelves of The Convenience Store are filled, as are many of its kind, with prepackaged off-brand knockoffs of recognised products, unsatisfying, made with cheap ingredients, frustrating in that they purport to be equivalent to something known but only reminding with every bite that they are inferior, only acceptable as an alternative of desperation if there is truly nothing better available as first choice.
Glasgow Film Festival continues until Sunday 8th March
