Is Your Apartment Haunted By A Japanese Pop Star? ‘Liza The Fox-Fairy’ Reviewed
by Rachel Bellwoar
There are movies you enjoy and there are movies that aren’t your cup of tea, but it’s not everyday that a movie surprises you. Károly Ujj Mészáros‘ Liza the Fox-Fairy takes risks that payoff and isn’t afraid to follow the beat of its own drum.
Like far too many festival films that have their day in the sun but then aren’t heard from, Liza screened at festivals in 2015 but only became available on Blu-ray in 2022 thanks to Cauldron Films. It’s the happy ending this film deserves, and while it’s taken me four years to catch on, I’m ready to sing this film’s praises and catch up for lost time.
Everyone has their monster preferences. Some prefer vampire movies, others werewolf, but for my money, kitsune and the mythology around them are some of the coolest around. At the same time, they haven’t been covered as often, so the tropes aren’t as well-developed or nailed down. With the classic monsters, you expect silver bullets and stakes. With kitsune, it’s not as established what to expect. The Mad Fox is a great example of a kitsune movie. The TV show Teen Wolf introduced a kitsune character in season three, but if that interest in learning more about “fox-fairies” is what got me in the door, that’s not the only thing this movie has to offer.
Liza (Mónika Balsai) is a nurse who wants to fall in love and keeps trying to put herself out there, but (starting with her client) people keep dying around her until Liza begins to suspect she might be cursed. Other characters include Tomy Tani (David Sakurai), the ghost of a Japanese pop star who lives in the flat with Liza, and Sergeant Zoltán (Szabolcs Bede Fazekas), a police officer who rents one of Liza’s rooms.
Set in the ’70s but with a ’60s go-go boot aesthetic, I came into this film anticipating a Casper the Friendly Ghost situation. After all, in the trailer Liza and Tomy are shown singing together. He’s dressed in a bright green suit. His choreography and hair are very Elvis-coded. This is one of those surprises I was talking about earlier, though, and it’s not a last-minute reveal – it’s a character choice that the trailer doesn’t give away, so I’ll try not to either.
Zoltán, on the other hand, feels like a character straight out of an Aki Kaurismaki movie (specifically his Leningrad Cowboys films), as Zoltán’s fondness for Finnish Western music gets him a cowboy edit that couldn’t be more different from Liza’s romance novel approach to life.
If this film sounds like a weird, eclectic mix of elements and cultures, that’s because it is, but somehow they all mesh together. This film is also very aware of class, and Liza’s lack of money regularly impacts her attempts to find love, whether it’s her taking a page from The Sound of Music and using curtains to make a dress, or the comfort she gets out of going to her favorite fast food restaurant and bringing home a new toy that she wraps in a paper napkin first.
Cauldron Film’s Blu-ray comes with a few behind-the-scenes videos, including one on the filming locations in Hungary, and an audio essay by film historian Kat Ellinger that goes over kitsune mythology and the film’s gaslighting themes, as Liza tries to understand why she’s so unlucky in life (and death).
Liza the Fox-Fairy is a special movie and is currently available on Blu-ray from Cauldron Films.
