Bad ending, sorry kids *spoiler*

Umm, perhaps I'm the one missing something here, but, wasn't the whole point of Yoshimi's self-sacrifice to accent the fact that she would sooner die than see her daughter be put in danger? I thought that that's what made the movie beautiful, as opposed to a typical 'leave the haunted apartment unharmed' ending.

"I have the heart of a small boy... Which I keep in a jar on my desk."-Robert Bloch

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I think I could solve all of the problems in this movie with some simple words: "Call the Ghostbusters!" I mean seriously, if you're being haunted by a neglected ghost girl that wants to make you her mother, then why can't you bend the rules of reality a teensy bit? Check out the Ringu/Ghostbusters vid on Youtube and you'll see how well that works. Or you could just get the mob to set the apartment on fire and collect on the insurance.

She would have lost her daughter one way or the other: 1) to her ex-husband if she moved out and claimed ghosts as the reason. 2) to the ghost or 3) due to her own death.

At the time she made the decision, that ghost was glomming onto her in a gross muddy way, probably killing her, anyway, so she made the obvious choice of protecting her child.

Maybe she SHOULD have done this or that, but she didn't, and so in that moment, she HAD to let the ghost have her.

She didn't know before that night what was actually going on.

At least the Japanese version doesn't beat you over the head with it like the U.S. version does (I saw the U.S. version first). Now in THAT version, they should have moved out because it was much more obvious what was going on, and for a LONG time after they knew what was up, they still stayed on.

This version was much more subtle, with the exception of the mud-baby, and also it was much sadder, and the acting much better.

I was creeped out by both of them, but I think the Japanese version was far superior.

Here's what I want to know: WHERE can I find an apartment where the other tenants are non-existant?



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Aagh; you're a HEDGE!

I didn't mind the ending, but I have to support the original poster and agree that it didn't really make 'sense'.

Though the 'I'd rather sacrifice my life than see my daughter harmed' angle is really sweet- were the reasons that people gave on this board for sticking around this obviously haunted and dangerous place really harder to overcome than giving your life to a ghoul? Not really. But as one poster mentioned, it was probably just too late by that point to do anything else.

That being said, movies don't always have to make sense, and I thought the ending was untraditional and haunting and I sort of dug it.

I think the main point has already been said that her decision to sacrifice herself was to protect her daughter, but no one has mentioned also the fact that the mother felt a great amount of empathy for Mistuko. Although abandoning her own daughter was obviously very hard for her, I think that she felt good about being able to help mitsuko. Yoshimi had tried to move out of the apartment but her lawyer talked her out of it as well as made her believe that everything was just a trick of her mind.

So it's not the usual American ending... Yoshimi doesn't say some magic words that make everything all good again, but it's a logical ending considering both Yoshimi's and Mitsuko's past. I must admit, the ending left me with a bad feeling, but it was great to experience a different kind of storytelling.

What makes Asian cinema different is that often, these characters who have a bad ending don't particularly deserve it, but isn't that just like real life? What you want is a reason to hate Yoshimi, and if you look at American horror films, it's always the girls who have sex and the boys take drugs who die first, but this convention really isn't that logical or realistic.

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To add to everyone else's explanation as to why she didn't leave - her lawyer brought the building owner and the apartment manager up to the apartment where the water was coming from...and then also investigated the roof.

They came to the conclusion that the red bag issue was probably kids (and I assume they believe that kids also broke into the apartment and turned on the water).

Once those issues were brought out into the open, they assumed it was safe. Yoshimi knew that she was under stress and probably assumed that the things she saw were hallucinations (remember she was told she was sleep walking like she did when she was a child).

These are all rational explanations and instead of risking losing her daughter, she decided that the "ghostly" things she was seeing were not real (which is what most people would think).

The ghost girl (Matsuki?) was attacking the mother UNTIL she said "I am your mother." I think she would have died either way but doing it the way that she did she spared her daughter seeing her get strangled by Matsuki and possibly from going after her daughter.

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http://www.imdb.com/mymovies/list?l=30077532