I re-watched this film some 17 years later and i has changed my mind about it. When i first saw it in around 2006 i
found it to be very bad and without any merits at all. I was a huge Kiyoshi Kurosawa fan and i adored his films,
as Cure, Pulse, Charisma and Bright Future made in his unique personal style, enigmatic crime-horror-dramas.
Along with 2005 "Loft" and the 2006 "Retribution" he had a fling with J-Horror before starting to make a more
artmovie like drama like the 2008 "Tokyo Sonata" which were shown at the Cannes Festival (where probably
Kiyoshi Kurosawa started to eye what the european film critics wanted to see from him ?)

Anyway, i hated this film "Loft" and i trashed it. I found the script and the acting to be atrocious, but when
re-watching it in august 2023 i saw a lot of positive things which i didn't bother to notice 17 years earlier.
Maybe i was not ready for the change of his filmmaking style, from enigmatic masterpieces to J-Horror.

In 2023 i noticed this positive things about the film: The setting was fine with dilapidated gloomy looking
buildings, a creepy old house, a creepy old Mummy, a very fine ambient industrial soundtrack and also fine
cinematography from Akiko Ashizawa giving the film a whole lot of atmosphere.
Some scenes were really scary involving the Mummy and the shadows in the house were genuinely Kurosawa.
But, the last 30 minutes or so were still not very good and the acting from Etsushi Toyokawa was below par.
At 115 minutes the film were too long and finally not that engaging. So, the visuals and the sound is the
main reason to watch this film as they were brilliant. There were some fun and quirky moments too.

The writer Reiko Haruna (Miki Nakatani) suffers from a writing block and her editor, Kijima, finds her an old
house at the outskirts of the town where she can find inspiration and write him a new romantic novel.
She also ails from puking up some stuff that looks like black mud.
In the rundown house next to her she sees a man carrying around what looks like a dead body .... or is it a
1 000 years old Mummy ? The house belongs to Sagami University and the man is Dr. Yoshioka Makoto
(Etsushi Toyokawa), the man who found the mummy in the nearby swamp. Yes, it's an old Mummy and not a
younger dead body and when he asks her to keep the mummy for a couple of days, she accepts.
So Reiko keeps the creepy mummy in her living room, close to her workplace and close to her bed ....

Who's the woman in black, is her editor a maniac and what's real and what's not real ?

Film is presented in 4:3 fullscreen ratio and with japanese audio DD 2.0 with english subtitles, picture gallery