★★★
Ken’ichi Ugana’s digital-age ghost story rarely rises above routine horror craft, but its grisly flashes and brazen finale leave a stronger aftertaste than its flat middle stretch suggests.
From the start, The Curse promises to fuse J-horror tradition with the unease of the algorithm. A young woman’s death, broadcast and dissected online, pushes her friend Riko, played with quiet steadiness by Yukino Kaizu, into the malign corners of social media where folklore and virality bleed together. It is a sharp idea, possession by feed as much as by spirit, but the execution seldom matches the premise. The film lacks the unheimlich shiver that once defined the V-horror wave, when a skewed angle or a stuttering rhythm could make the ordinary feel cursed. Ugana’s images are too clean and too literal, so what should unsettle simply sits there.
The concept has a promising lineage: Ringu cursed its VHS tape; Kairo (Pulse) let ghosts drift through internet chatrooms; One Missed Call turned mobiles into death notes. Ugana’s update is obvious but timely; in 2025, the curse spreads by algorithm, amplified through feeds no one can switch off. The chain holds, each film binding the supernatural to the dominant technology of its era, but here the imagery never lives up to that inheritance. Smart in theory, flat on screen.
There are jolts – a handful of grisly practical effects, from hair to paper dolls to mangled bodies, show a willingness to get messy. These moments do not sustain dread, but they keep the film from sinking into total blandness.
Only in the closing act does Ugana let go. The horror lurches into gleeful chaos, bold enough to be mischievous rather than rote. That stretch lands harder than anything before it, and a sly post-credits tag makes the joke explicit: the solemn mask was never the point.
Still, the film stays mid-tier. Flat visuals, thin ideas, and a lineage it cannot quite find a way to live up to hold it back. Yet the nerve of its ending and the occasional grisly spark keep it from vanishing. Even a routine J-horror, it transpires, can find a way to go out with a curse worth waiting for.
The Curse played at Fantastic Fest in Austin, TX
Whitlock&Pope 