A long drive through winding Japanese forestland and a slow zoom into a fogbound hotel lodge immediately throw us into haunted territory in “Never After Dark.” From the writer-director Dave Boyle, this gruesomely sinister and eerily atmospheric ghost story follows a traveling psychic who comes up against a formidable new adversary.
Moeka Hoshi, from the FX series “Shogun,” plays Airi, a seasoned spiritualist whose job is to guide lost souls into the next realm and out of her rattled clients’ homes. Her latest gig comes courtesy of a flamboyantly-dressed chalet owner (Tae Kimura) who’s seen a slack-jawed ghoul creeping around her property. Airi is blasé about the job, but Miku (Kurumi Inagaki), her dead sister who materializes in an array of reflective surfaces, preaches caution.
The owner’s skeptical son (Kento Kaku) provides a dash of wry flirtation, snooping around Airi’s ghostbusting process despite her insistence on its dangers. With a breezy confidence, Airi pulls out her mystic tools: a candle, a chunk of her own hair and a zoetrope-encircled mirror. But Boyle leaves creepy clues around to unsettle our footing and challenge Airi’s poise in the gauzy phantom realm as well as the earthly human one.
A tin of human teeth and a restless spirit that bears an odd resemblance to a mysterious visitor (Mutsuo Yoshioka) spark the film’s many snaking fuses, which smolder to the glassy chimes and moaning vocals of Jonathan Snipes’s excellent score. Fans of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s cerebral horror — like “Creepy” (2016) and “Chime” (2024), which stars Yoshioka — will find some common ground in Boyle’s chiller, though its crackling, crowd-pleasing finale also gives it a high-energy Hollywood gloss. It’s a best-of-both-worlds coup.
Never After Dark Not rated. In Japanese, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters.
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