15 year old Yukie (Yui Miura) has been plagued by nightmares lately,
just like her best friends at school. But when they start to die, she
begins to see a connection, and soon enough she finds a culprit too, Yuko
(Hanae Kan), whom she and her friends have been bullying. Yukie turns to
Kyoichi Kagenuma (Ryuhei Matsuda), the nightmare detective who has
the unique ability to enter other people's nightmares - but Kagenuma turns
her pleas for help down, mainly because he is plagued by nightmares of his
own lately, nightmares about his mother (Miwako Ichikawa), who has hanged
herself when he still was a little boy but has come back to haunt him ever
since. But as time progresses, Yukie's case becomes more and more a
subject of his own nightmares as well, and ultimately he offers his help after
all, also because Yukie reminds him of his mother. Entering Yukie's
nightmares, Kagenuma can't but notice the similarities between his and her
dreams, above all else omnipresent images of water and drowning, but it is
when he (in the nightmare) saves Yuko from hanging herself - something he
failed to do back in the day when his mother hanged herself and he, a
pre-teen boy, didn't have the capabilities of doing - that brings tehe
change, and after that,
Yukie's safe from her classmate's vengeance. But mommy still appears in
his nightmares to haunt Kagenuma ... What's true for the first Nightmare
Detective is true here as well: Shinya Tsukamoto is best when he is
making movies without narrative constrictions, when he is pinned down by
genre formulas on the other hand, like he is here, his work is just
average. Sure, Nightmare Detective 2 is competently made as far as
the craft of moviemaking goes, but there's nothing beyond that, quite the
contrary, the film has very little to distinguish itself from other,
similar Japanese horror movies by lesser directors, and sometimes their
films are even better than Tsukamoto's. That said, Nightmare
Detective 2 is not too bad a film, but it's definitely not a movie
that Tsukamoto could have become famous with either.
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