"The Booth" is a riveting character thriller informed by a convincing realism and familiarity It's totally focused on a broadcast booth, a radio talk show star, and female retribution.
The Nippon Broadcasting Co.'s studio 6 sets the scene. A veteran late night talk show host receives a call from a woman suicide partner whom in thirty years has never grieved for. The phone and the lines start to sear with disruptions, he gets guilt/ghost stricken by her voice, feels trapped in his booth, and hangs himself.
Many years later a popular radio host for Tokyo LoveLine is forced by circumstance to do his show from that same closed down studio. Shoto is all the rave with the late night lonelies, especially with the women listeners. He's totally in control, holds his audience in his hands, and can effectively run the emotional gamut a show like this requires. He's a potent mix of expressive personality, manipulativeness, insensitivity, gratuitous sympathy, and showmanship. Despite his womanizing (on the air, but mostly in flash backs) women adore and trust him.
We are in Shoto's shoes, as his image fills the screen for the duration. We ride his highs and squirm with his lows. But the highs are at best very intermittent because Shoto is suddenly faced with a similar predicament to his suicide predecessor in Studio 6. Except this is the extended circuit, the prime feature in full color.
The booth quickly becomes claustrophobic as line interruptions and voices start to disrupt his advice conversations with jilted lovers. The voice "you are a liar" begins to distract him to such an extent that he cannot focus on the actual conversation, and his fright state makes hearing impossible. His trusted assistant can only do so much to help him answer his angry callers who accuse him of being a bad listener and out of control.
The great communicator is caught naked--he cannot communicate and fakes his way through to music breaks. He grows more and more distraught as the booth seems to be conspiring against him, He feels more and more crampt, and desperate losing all scope, and all fellowship with his technical staff. Is he up against the ghost of a woman he has abused and perhaps left for dead, her actual self, an office staff conspiracy to bring him down, or plain guilt?
What we do know is that crimes against women possess these two love experts to the point that these harmed women inhabit them and demand their own justice. By what medium this is done is not important. What does matter is that these betrayers of women can no longer live with their hypocrisy, their crime, their guilt. And that their huge public gets the message.
The key strength of "The Booth" is that in never abandons reality for fantasy. The dead indeed may have awakened, but in a way that no viewer can doubt. Thirty years of stoical waiting in a grave, or several hours afloat in the vast sea, that impact can arise out of nothingness is never in question. If the two women have been given the power of lovers, so can they possess the power of judge. The booth itself is proof of that. (grade 7+)
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