Ghost Town review – the phantoms and lost souls haunting a Japanese city after the 2011 earthquake

Katharine Round’s documentary puts cameras in taxis where drivers and fares reflect on the disaster’s impact and talk of crowds of spectres and disappearing passengers

In a manner similar to Ryūsuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car, in which journeying lulls passengers into greater intimacy, this nocturnal taxi odyssey through the tsunami-hit city of Kamaishi on Japan’s east coast clears the road for the subconscious to manifest. Conversations between the drivers and their customers drift back towards the cataclysm of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami with an undertow of grief, loss and absence. But at least this time there’s someone in the rear-view mirror to converse with; some drivers claim to have picked up phantom fares who later vanished from the back seat.

The tsunami, it seems, breached the wall between the dead and living, dreams and reality. One taxi rank veteran says he saw spectres crowding into a phone booth one night after the disaster, as if trying to call for help to get home. Another recounts a dream of a drowning white horse. The subconscious functions as early warning system too: in another dream, a passenger is advised not to take a road that was later submerged. Other voyagers don’t believe in the supernatural, or question their ability to see the revenants. But perhaps the lost souls are there anyway, in the form of the deer picking through hillside cemeteries or glimpsed at the roadside. “They are messengers from God,” insists a devout driver.

Kamaishi appears to be a kind of living mausoleum; not just because of the tsunami, but also – with most of the featured drivers and passengers of a certain age, bemoaning the lack of young people – in the context of superannuated Japan. British director Katharine Round is suspended in this purgatory, until a couple of more personal stories (coaxed out by journalist Shiori Itō, who as an outsider to Kamaishi, provides the main thread through the segments) hone this broad mythic material to a finer point. One of the drivers relates his youth as a local thug; another his gambling and carousing. It’s the human folly and flotsam that will be swept away one day in the great ocean of non-being. Round’s soothing night-drive caresses everything with a touch of the metaphysical.