Occultic;Nine

Episode 6

Today's Occultic;Nine opens in its own uniquely characteristic fashion, by introducing yet another supernatural plot point out of nowhere. Reporter Touko Sumikaze calls the Kiri Kiri Basara crew (which now consists of Yuta, Ryoka, Miyuu, and Sarai) to tell them about something called a kotoribako. A kotoribako is a cursed box that kills women and children. You make it by sacrificing a child and planting their remains in the box. The deal is that you plant it somewhere secretly so that people start dying but nobody knows why. The Death Box was brought to our heroes' attention when they saw one depicted in Ririka's prophetic doujin, which indicates that there's one at a shrine or temple somewhere. She drew it with a prominent lock, so I presume that's what Hashigami's tooth key is supposed to open up. Just as our heroes are about to go investigate, Aria Kurenaino walks in.

Last week, Aria saw our heroes colluding and assumed that they were after her. She ran over here to scare them off, but now it seems that she's overheard their conversation about the kotoribako. After freaking them out with a display of her powers, she points them in the direction of the correct temple and warns them about a white-haired boy. Before leaving, Kiryu Kusakabe (Aria's devil) seems to recognize Izumi, the okama barkeep.

The crew goes to the temple and finds a white-haired kid playing with a box full of blood. That seems suspicious. He rambles for a while about “needing a sacrifice” before wandering off, so I guess he made a mistake with this attempt. He says “so it was you” to Miyuu before he leaves, so Miyuu looks inside the Death Box to find proof that it contains Chi, now pounded into human pudding. She freaks out, understandably.

A little later, we see Shuu interrogating Aria for information regarding the Death Box. He tries to connect it to another type of cursed object – kodoku. That's when you put a bunch of bugs in an urn until most of them kill each other and only the strongest bug remains. The resulting uberbug is said to fuel some powerful magic. Shuu connects this to the discovered kotoribako because apparently bits of people other than Chi were found inside it. He suspects that someone tried to combine the two ideas. Meanwhile, Aria just wants him to go away. Ignoring her resistance, Shuu starts questioning her on her “devil.” He hits an emotional sore spot by positing that she's using Kiryu as an emotional replacement for her deceased big brother and his unconditional love. That's when she snaps, forcing him out of her store. On the way out, it becomes apparent that Shuu can see Kiryu, as he advises the devil “not to get too absorbed in this.”

Cut to the secret organization that's behind all this having one of their meetings. They ramble about zen and mortality and “the prison of time” and stuff. It seems that they want to be immortal, and in order to achieve that, they've developed something called the “New World System” based on Nikola Tesla's incomplete theorem, where they will become immortal by discarding their physical bodies to live on the astral plane or something. They're responsible for the suicides, who were all stage one test subjects. Professor Hashigami was presumably involved with this group somehow – their ideas are based on his research. The group is now extremely powerful, having fostered the occult fascinations that dominate this show's version of Japan. One of the members is mad that they killed all of the test subjects in such a flashy way. Another responds that they needed to be eliminated because a few were starting to get “bugs” that could have jeopardized the entire project. Then they announce that they're moving on to “stage two.”

This gets us to the episode's big revelation: everyone is already dead! This Sixth Sense-esque twist has been in the works since the third episode, when the mass suicide occurred. It turns out that our principal cast (minus Kiryu, who's been immaterial for a while) all died on that day, and they've spent the past three episodes as spirits! Well, we only receive confirmation that Yuta, Shuu, and Touko are deceased, but I suspect that it's all of them, considering that they're able to interact with one another. They all were test subjects in the Big Secret Organization's plan to find immortality via the astral plane, and considering that there aren't a few hundred other spirits running around, I suspect that they were the “bugged” ones. In hindsight, this revelation was foreshadowed by some scenes involving Toko, but it still falls into the Sixth Sense problem of “how did these people not notice that nobody was talking to them for so long?” Like, did they never go buy food from the store? This also makes Izumi even more suspicious for having interacted with them all this time. This only reifies my conviction: never trust a homophobic stereotype.

Occultic;Nine's visual execution continues to be its saving grace. The “comedic” banter is irritating, and a bunch of the dialogue is just the characters exchanging trivia. I neither like nor dislike any characters in particular, and the plot still relies on how often the show can top itself in terms of conspiratorial spectacle. But there's constantly so much happening visually that my eyeballs get dragged along for the full 20 minutes. My favorite part this week was the Aria/Shuu conversation, where they just decided to spin the camera around for a full minute, only to halt it abruptly when Shuu said something devastating. The show is filled with moments like these, where the camera does something wacky to distract from yet another round of exposition. On a sensory level alone, these tricks are entertaining and effective at creating the staccato pacing that this show relies on. But at the same time, they also tend to create emotional distance from the characters. The time I spent admiring a strange shot could have been spent getting into Sarai's headspace in the aftermath of his father's death, for example.

That's why, for as much as I'm impressed by Occultic;Nine's visuals, I'm not sure that I can call it good direction. It's pure spectacle, gliding over the content rather than working with it to maximize emotional impact. But maybe that's the best they could do with this material. Halfway into its run and Occultic;Nine is far from the trainwreck that its early goings implied. It's developed some admirable traits (the visuals and suspenseful plotting), but that's still not quite enough to make the show compelling. My only hope is that it keeps getting crazier.

Grade: B

Occultic;Nine is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Gabriella Ekens studies film and literature at a US university. Follow her on twitter.