Parisian Jean is hired as an assistant to Stefan, a professional photographer who doggedly sticks to 19th century daguerreotype photographic processes. In order to take his best photos, he forces his daughter Marie to remain still for extended periods of time. Exhausted, Marie wants to leave her father and falls in love with Jean. Daguerreotype’s splendor is made possible through Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s mastership of the horror genre. Stefan’s mansion, a nod to the classic “haunted house,” is completely impenetrable from the outside, its maze-like interior allowing for horrors to appear from seemingly anywhere. With such genre infusions, the film still retains Kurosawa’s signature aesthetics. Perhaps this is due to his Eastern perspectives about nature, but it also may be the way Marie and Jean are presented, intermediaries between the real and the unreal. Whether or not Marie is human or a ghost is left up to our imaginations, Kurosawa’s deft hand pointing toward a possible answer. A cinematic masterpiece in which the boundary between life and death makes a persuasive case for a belief in ghosts. (RHEE Souewon)