Abduction: The Megumi Yokota Story

[January 31st, 2007] [SHORT RUN] When the brother of Megumi Yokota describes his sibling as "spirited away," it's impossible not to think for a moment of the film by Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki that takes the phrase for its name. Spirited Away is a charming cartoon about a 10-year-old girl who flees into a world of ancient gods after her parents make some unfortunate dining decisions and are turned into pigs. Abduction: The Megumi Yokota Story plays like a sickening negative print of the same tale. Another girl—a real one—disappears into the night, and her parents are left to feed on their own worst fears.

On Nov. 15, 1977, 13-year-old Megumi Yokota was kidnapped from Niigata, Japan. It took nearly 20 years for investigators to learn that her disappearance was part of North Korea's international diplomacy. From '77 to '83, Kim Il Sung's agents were under orders to abduct as many Japanese citizens as they could, for use in training other agents to act more Japanese. They managed to snatch 13 people, and Abduction directors Chris Sheridan and Patty Kim have endeavored to show the horror left in the kidnappers' wake. They get off to a poor start: The documentary's early scenes are a mixture of exploitative reenactments and lush nature footage, as if an episode of Unsolved Mysteries had been crossed with a Jack Handy video. But the stories of the victims' families—who wait first for acknowledgement of the crimes and then for any word of their relations' fates—soon take center stage, and they are agonizingly well told.

Kim Il Sung and his son Kim Jong Il are venerated as gods in the wasteland they've created. They certainly possess one quality of the old deities: inhuman caprice. Abduction paints just a small picture of the sufferings inflicted by despots, but it is superbly effective in evoking what it must feel like to stare into the maw of an illogical and inscrutable atrocity. Megumi's mother eventually takes solace in Christianity, and finds particular comfort in Job's declaration that "the Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away." But in North Korea, as in much of the world, the gods promise only the second part.

—AARON MESH.