FrightFest Glasgow review – The Curse (2025)
Like The Convenience Store, this revisits the J-horror boom of the turn of the millennium – though it does have some 2020s elements which update not just the tech (it’s all smartphones and the pivot to video) but the social media milieu. There may be a traditional long-haired yurei enacting this curse by driving young women to madness and freak death but the motive of the unleasher of the curse is relatively fresh. Writer-director Kenichi Ugana opens with a primal horror scene – a girl by a road late at night is pestered by the spook, and gets ground up by a passing lorry. Our viewpoint character is Riko (Yukino Kaizu), a blameless young woman who works as a hairdresser in Tokyo. She notices an odd social media post from a friend who has moved to Taiwan and calls her ex, who’s also gone there, only to find that her friend died and someone else must be using her account. Rika’s more outgoing friend Airi engages with the impostor and is sent a video clip of a magic ritual in which a curse is sicced on Airi by bashing a ketchup-filled paper doll to which her ID photo has been attached (protip if you don’t want to be curse – use something other than your face as an online avatar).
For a couple of reels, the film goes as you’d expect – curses are inevitable, and so is the plotting of films like this. Airi goes from lively girl to bedraggled hauntee and then gets gruesomely got … a homeless person spots that Rika has been cursed and makes a fuss before the ghost throttles him in the salon … and Rika travels to Taiwan, where curses are taken more seriously, to reconnect with her old boyfriend (who acts in a slightly suspect manner) and seek out help. As in most curse films, scientific and religious authorities are useless – an attempted exorcism goes spectacularly South. Things get slightly less predictable in the finale, which runs to grotesque grand guignol and a diva-like performance from Ray Fan as a social media witch with an endless well of grudges and bile … if her pet ghosts don’t do the trick, she’s happy to serve poisoned tea or make use of a handy machete, all the while dancing to inappropriate pop music.
The most interesting angle of the film is slightly unexplored – the resentment felt by followers at online icons who may be projecting an idealised version of their lives and the way haters as much as fans think they know real truths about people they don’t actually know – but gives a charge to what might otherwise be business as usual in the Ring/Grudge/One Missed Call arena. Another issue with many curse films, which this doesn’t quite dodge, is the general feeling of hopeless/endless malignity which mitigates against investing emotionally in relatively bland, inoffensive people who are unlikely to make it to the end credits alive or whole. Seems we don’t get to know them either and only the ghost is likely to stick around for the sequel.
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