Katharine Round's Ghost Town operates at the speed of a late-night fare — unhurried, a little disorienting, and surprisingly intimate by the time you arrive. The film is structured as a series of nocturnal conversations inside Kamaishi taxis, the tsunami-hit city on Japan's east coast, and the form does exactly what Round needs it to: the lull of the road dissolves the usual social armor, and passengers and drivers say things they might not say anywhere else. The supernatural material is handled with a scrupulous non-commitment that serves it well. A veteran driver saw spectres crowding a phone booth after the disaster, as if trying to call home. Another driver dreamed of a drowning white horse. A passenger was warned in a dream not to take a road that was later submerged. Round never editorializes these accounts — she doesn't bracket them as superstition or affirm them as testimony. They float in the same documentary space as the living interviews, which is exactly right. What the film is really about, beneath the ghost stories, is a specific kind of community grief — the kind that has no clean resolution because the event that caused it was too large to process individually. Kamaishi's dead were not all mourned by people who could agree on what happened or why. The tsunami breached something, and the breach hasn't closed. The phone-booth spectres aren't just atmospheric detail; they're an image of communication severed mid-sentence. Journalist Shiori Itō provides the connective tissue as an outsider to Kamaishi, and her presence is the film's smartest structural choice. An insider narrator would flatten the strangeness into local color; Itō's outsider status keeps the film in the register of genuine inquiry. It's through her that the more personal stories emerge — a driver's youth as a local thug, another's gambling and carousing — and these human-scale details anchor what might otherwise drift into pure myth-making. Round is also alive to the second, slower catastrophe running alongside the tsunami's legacy: demographic collapse. Most of the drivers and passengers are older; the young have left. Kamaishi is a living mausoleum twice over — once for the dead, once for the future that didn't stay. The deer moving through hillside cemeteries, glimpsed at the roadside, feel less like supernatural messengers and more like nature reclaiming ground that people are quietly abandoning. The film's weakness is the one the review acknowledges obliquely: it takes time to find its finer point. The early segments, beautiful as they are, risk a certain sameness — another driver, another dream, another glance at the empty hills. Round's instinct for the metaphysical is strong, but the film needed a slightly sharper editorial hand in its middle third. The personal stories, when they arrive, demonstrate what was available all along. What Ghost Town achieves is harder than it looks: a documentary that takes grief seriously as something that reshapes the fabric of reality for the people inside it, without sentimentality and without the false reassurance of closure. The dead are still missing. The taxis still run. Someone may or may not be in the back seat.
