Movies are confidence tricks played on willing victims. The bullets are blanks and the sex is faked, but we usually want to believe, as long as the lights are down, that it's all real. Creating that belief — or rather, that suspension of disbelief — has long been Hollywood's goal.
But there are also filmmakers — Lars von Trier ("Dogville") being one, Peter Greenaway ("The Pillow Book") being another — who make us aware that we are watching art by stripping away the illusion of realism.
Keisuke Horibe, a veteran TV director making his feature debut with the suspense-comedy "Akumu no Elevator" ("Nightmare Elevator"), wants to entertain, not make a statement about film aesthetics. But halfway through the film, he gleefully overturns all our assumptions about what we've been seeing. We've been played, in other words, and rather skillfully too.