Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa (no relation to Akira) has been keeping busy...very busy. The veteran filmmaker has already dropped two movies over the last year, his Cannes award-winning drama Journey to the Shore, and Creepy, which is in more in tune with the horror genre he's known for. Now he's back and heading to TIFF with the oddly-titled thriller, Daguerrotype, and a tense trailer for it is here.
Starring Tahar Rahim, Constance Rousseau, Olivier Gourmet, and Mathieu Amalric, centers on a photographer's assistant who notices something disturbing in the photographs of his boss's daughter. The vibe I'm getting is almost like Guillermo Del Toro's Crimson Peak, but in Kurosawa's hands he's sure to do something special. Here's the synopsis followed by the trailer. No release date for this one yet.
The aging photographer, Stéphane (Olivier Gourmet), still in mourning, is obsessed with taking life-sized daguerreotypes. This process, commonly used in the early years of the medium, needs a long exposure, requiring the subjects to remain motionless for extended periods of time. (Nineteenth-century superstition also held that the process gave eternal afterlife to the people captured on film.)
Stéphane’s new employee, Jean (Tahar Rahim), gets caught up in an increasingly bizarre web involving his boss’ alluring daughter, Marie (Constance Rousseau), who often poses for her father in scenarios that begin to disturb Jean due to both their subject matter and their duration. He is soon dealing with Marie’s desire to escape this prison. Meanwhile, Jean is also identified by developers as someone who could influence the reluctant and crusty Stéphane to sell his considerable land holdings.
