Ghost Town review: phantom fares and grief in post-tsunami Kamaishi

Katharine Round's documentary Ghost Town films its interviews inside taxis cruising the night streets of Kamaishi, the Japanese east-coast city devastated by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. The premise is simple: put a camera in the cab, let drivers and their fares talk, and watch the conversation drift back toward the disaster with what the film captures as an undertow of grief, loss and absence.

The structural model is familiar. Round's nocturnal taxi odyssey works, as the review notes, in a manner similar to Ryūsuke Hamaguchi's Drive My Car, where journeying lulls passengers into greater intimacy. The moving car clears the road, so to speak, for the subconscious to manifest. Eyes on the road, hands on the wheel — the passenger talks.

What do the drivers actually claim?

The film's most striking material is supernatural, and Round treats it as testimony rather than spectacle:

• Some drivers claim to have picked up phantom fares who later vanished from the back seat.
• One taxi rank veteran says he saw spectres crowding into a phone booth after the disaster, as if trying to call for help to get home.
• Another recounts a dream of a drowning white horse.
• In a further dream, a passenger is advised not to take a road that was later submerged — the subconscious functioning as an early warning system.

Not everyone onboard believes. Other voyagers don't believe in the supernatural at all, or question their own ability to see the revenants. The film doesn't adjudicate. The tsunami, it suggests, breached the wall between the dead and the living, between dreams and reality — and the ambiguity is the point.

Round also lets the city itself do some of the speaking. The lost souls may be there anyway, in the form of deer picking through hillside cemeteries or glimpsed at the roadside. One devout driver leaves no room for doubt. "They are messengers from God," he insists.

What does this change for the disaster documentary?

The mechanism is worth naming. Instead of archive footage or casualty figures, Ghost Town locates the 2011 catastrophe in the present tense — in cab conversations, night roads and half-believed sightings. Grief appears as something a city carries in its routine traffic, not as an event confined to the past. There's a quiet irony in the format, too: at least this time there's someone in the rear-view mirror to converse with, where other drivers swear the back seat was once occupied by the vanished.

The film joins a small body of work — Drive My Car among them — that treats vehicular journeys as confessional spaces in Japanese storytelling. For audiences, it offers a documentary of absence: a city talking, at night, about the people who are no longer there to ride.