Reincarnation (輪廻, Rinne) is a 2005 Japanese horror film directed by Takashi Shimizu and written by Takashi Shimizu and Masaki Adachi. Preceded by Infection and Premonition (予言) Reincarnation is the third film in producer Takashige Ichise's six part J-Horror Theater series.

Reincarnation premiered at the 18th Tokyo International Film Festival on October 27, 2005. It was theatrically released in the United States as one of the eight films in the nationwide film festival Horrorfest, which ran November 17 through 21, 2006

Synopsis

35 years ago, a series of terrible murders took place in a tourist hotel. A college professor had apparently gone mad and, as part of his wish to understand reincarnation, filmed himself killing 11 of the hotel guests and employees, as well as his own children, to finally commit suicide. Although since then, footage of the murders has disappeared.

In the present day, horror movie director Matsumura decides to make a movie about the massacre. As the date of the shoot draws near, Nagisa Sugiura, the actress who is set to star as the professor's daughter, is haunted by the ghosts of the victims. She begins to hallucinate and is plagued by nightmares of the killings. However, Nagisa is not the only person who is seeing these visions.

A college girl has a vision similar to Nagisa's first visions of arriving just outside the hotel. She wakes up in the middle of a psychology class, in which the professor publicly opposes the ideas of reincarnation and "cryptomnesia," a sense of nostalgia that does not match actual life experiences. She decides to write an essay supporting cryptomnesia and meets with a girl who was shown in the beginning of the movie, auditioning. The latter girl says that she remembers things in a "past life" of hers, and reveals a mark that would appear to be evidence of strangling on her neck, but that "had been there since [she] was born." The two girls check out the college library, but the latter one disappears.

Meanwhile, Nagisa begins to believe herself to be the reincarnation of the professor's little daughter, until she goes to the cubby where the little girl was slain and finds someone else there. When she sees the real reincarnation of the little girl, other victims, appearing as their reincarnations, are drawn back to the places where they died. (Two of the reincarnations were the girls in the previous paragraph.) Nagisa realizes she is not the reincarnation of a victim: instead, she was the homicidal professor.

The film ends with Nagisa in a mental hospital, bound in a full-body wrap and haunted by the souls of her past incarnation's children. The wife of the killer, the sole survivor, brings Nagisa the girl's favorite doll and the boy's favorite ball. She screams as they are shoved through the slot in the door into her solitary confinement cell, but then calms down and bears a crazed smile on her face. The ending song is Rinne by Aina Ougi.

Sequel

The film is part of the J-Horror series which exists from Hiroshi Takahashi's Kyôfu, Hideo Nakata's Kaidan, Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Retribution, Norio Tsuruta's Premonition and Masayuki Ochiai's Infection.

References