Katharine Round’s extraordinary and unusual documentary reflects on the experience of the inhabitants of Kamaishi in Japan following the 2011 earthquake there.
Image courtesy of Dartmouth Films.
by MANSEL STIMPSON
Filmed in Japan in the coastal city of Kamaishi in Iwate Prefecture, Ghost Town is the work of the English director Katharine Round. She has done much for television and has made numerous short films but her only previous feature was 2015's The Divide. There her humane eye studied the strains of what was then contemporary life through the experience of seven contrasted individuals and it proved to be an effective work made in a standard documentary mode. Ghost Town, however, is something very different. It is an extraordinary piece quite unlike anything that I have seen before. Being so very unusual, it is unlikely to be to everybody's taste but I found it very engaging in its originality. It is certainly in line with Round's declared interest in finding innovatory ways of challenging and pushing the boundaries of the documentary format. Indeed, I would choose to describe it as being a meditation on life, a film poem.
Ghost Town carries a distant echo of the Jim Jarmusch film Night on Earth (1991) since that was a piece which, although being an enacted fiction, was built around conversations between taxi drivers and their passengers during night-time journeys. Its tagline was "Five taxis, five cities, one night” and the cities featured were located partly in America and partly in Europe. In contrast to that, Ghost Town is limited to the one location and, as already indicated, counts as a documentary yet it consists mainly of talk in a comparable setting. Indeed, it introduces us to four employees of the Kamaishi taxi service heard in conversation with seven passengers. Six of the latter are actual local residents who when being filmed were encouraged to be impromptu about what they might choose to say. Nevertheless, much of what they brought up was triggered by a key event in the city’s history which they had experienced. That was the impact on Kamaishi in 2011 of an earthquake which, lasting some six minutes, caused a tsunami. It had a devastating impact with over a thousand killed there and the city’s housing reduced by a third. However, in contrast to these other passengers, we have one who is a visitor to the city and she is in fact played by Shiori Itō who directed the documentary Black Box Diaries in 2024 and is one of this film’s producers. For her appearance in Ghost Town IMDb lists her as an actress and, since the film bears no writing credit, it is an open question as to how much advance preparation went into what she as the visitor would say to her driver.
However, the question of the extent to which any comments heard were scripted is entirely insignificant because of the unique nature of the film. In terms of its structure what Katharine Round gives us is a kind of mosaic. Although four drivers feature and we get to learn something of their lives, the film does not follow each in turn but cuts from one to another as they talk with their various passengers. These journeys often take place at night, but not always since at times we get glimpses of the city in daylight along with everyday scenes in such settings as a dining bar, a place for traditional performances and the office run by the taxi controller. The most personal comments tend to come from the drivers themselves (they include a reaction to a failed marriage and a confession of delinquency in youth due to coming from a bad home). In very many cases the passengers reflect on their personal memories of that devastation in 2011 and comment on how since then the city has lost its liveliness and suffers from an absence of young people.
These comments tend overall to provide a general comment on life rather than offering individual stories and there is also another thread that runs through the film and which colours it in a similarly broad way. Round has acknowledged that one reason why she was drawn to filming in Kamaishi was seeing news reports which indicated that since the disaster taxi drivers had spoken of picking up passengers only to find that they did not exist – an implication that the city could be some kind of ghost town not just because of its decline but because it literally housed ghosts. In the event Round leaves all this relatively open. When the subject comes up during the various conversations, some dismiss the notion altogether and others only go so far as to regard such experiences as hallucinations. But eventually suggestions that it is certainly scary give way to at least one driver stating that he does indeed believe that these figures are spirits or shadows of the dead. It has already been pointed out that there are things in life, such as the wind, which you know to be present but which you cannot see. Furthermore, Round herself makes a point of drawing attention throughout the film to the frequent appearances in the streets of deer (they are also seen at a local cemetery) and we learn that, especially in the region of Nara, deer are regarded as messengers from God. The sense that a world of the spirits exists rather than carrying a sense of menace leads to reflection on what one owes to the dead and how grief for them should best be handled.
If Japanese beliefs play a part in Ghost Town, the meditation that it encourages in the viewer emphasises the fragility of life, a fact that is the more pronounced in Kamaishi because the older inhabitants cannot throw off memories of 2011. The film has no commentary but encourages viewers to reflect on life and what it contains, what its boundaries may be. This is largely achieved through the atmosphere that is created, one in which silence, sounds and music all play a part although Round is careful to exclude music from the soundtrack whenever the taxi conversations are in progress. This adds to their sense of shared intimacy which is also experienced by the viewer. It also offers further encouragement to regard these individual comments as going beyond the personal to become a reflection on life in general. Japan is itself a country in which natural disasters are part of its history, a place where loneliness is very much viewed as being part of the lives of many. Nevertheless, rather than being downbeat the film’s tone captures the extent to which all of this is accepted by the citizens.
While it is left to each viewer to decide how literally dead souls haunt our world, Round’s ability to capture the atmosphere present in Kamaishi is such that brief shots which come up three times and show a taxi being driven with no passenger apparent in the back seat make us feel that it is a space that is not really empty. Over and above that is the impact of the film’s closing section. Before it ends with another shot of a deer, there is a scene in which a driver leaves the city and heads for a quiet spot on the coast. On his arrival we are in a world of nature for the first time and what is conveyed is that in this setting he can find a sense of absolution. Such moments make Ghost Town memorable even if one hesitates to call it a masterpiece. It certainly seems right that the running time should only just exceed an hour and on the surface it is a minor work. But, even so, I may be underestimating it since its unique character does indeed make this a work which in its own way is genuinely haunting.
Featuring Toru Konno, Fumio Goto, Yoshiji Iwasaki, Masaaki Koike, Shiori Itō,Yoichi Matsuda, Shinichi Kuwahata, Pastor Yanagiya Yusuke, Nodoka Kikuchi, Akiko Iwasaki, Shino Dobashi, Sueko Kawarada.
Dir Katharine Round, Pro Katharine Round, Laura Shacham and Shiori Itō, Ph Jamie Quantrill, Ed John Mister and Katharine Round.
Disobedient Films/She Makes Productions-Dartmouth Films.
64 mins. UK. 2026. UK Rel: 6 November 2026. Cert. PG.
