Kenichi Ugana’s clever Japanese-Taiwanese chiller holds a biting social media mirror to traditional Asian horror fare
After her Taiwanese friend Shufen shares creepy and mysterious posts on Instagram, Tokyo receptionist Riko (Yukino Kaizu) tries to intervene–only to discover Shufen had died weeks before. Soon, hate-filled DMs target Riko’s friends, triggering bleeding eyes and bizarre hallucinations before they meet unexpected, grisly deaths. Realizing she’s next, Riko treks to Taiwan, where her ex-boyfriend and Shufen’s sister use their social media sleuthing skills to put an end to the curse once and for all.
At first glance, The Curse seems to be nothing new–a Gram-friendly update to the usual investigative horror popularized by Ring and Ju-on during the J-Horror boom of the 2000s (with nods to the era’s own Japanese-Taiwanese co-production, One Missed Call 2). But as the mystery deepens, Kenichi Ugana’s stylish, low-key thriller charts into more unpredictable, provocative territory, revealing how J-Horror’s technophobia has evolved over two decades—turning ordinary people into the very monsters they once feared under the cover of online anonymity.
Echoing his Japanese and Taiwanese horror contemporaries Koji Shiraishi and Kevin Ko, Ugana’s film packs in supernatural shocks, but grounds them in gorier, more intimate realism—eschewing the restraint that defined earlier Japanese horror. The film opens with a kill pointedly detached from the main plot, setting The Curse’s mischievous, malevolent tone: an unnamed girl flees an unseen specter à la It Follows, only to be dragged into the path of an oblivious truck driver…and for her decapitated body left as a stray dog’s grim snack. Such bracingly violent yet humorous carnage is found in the rest of the film, as victims of the film’s central curse indulge in crazed self-mutilation seemingly brought on by their exposure to social media. The result strikes the same earnest yet satirical tone Takashi Miike brought to One Missed Call, refreshing familiar tropes with a disturbingly timely bite.
The Curse’s tongue-in-cheek yet traumatizing streak gives Ugana room to seed sharper, more provocative ideas. The Curse arrives in a world beyond the prescient tech anxieties of the J-Horror boom–we’ve seemingly mastered the technology these films once feared, reveling in the total ubiquity of social media interconnectivity. If Pulse and Ring feared technology’s doorway to the unknown, The Curse fixates on how networked life leaves us exposed to the casual malice of complete strangers–and how the average person can be even more horrifying compared to any yurei of yore.
As one of the film’s sage exorcists intones, “people can do a lot of harm to others without being aware of it.” While the film follows the usual template of investigating and breaking a curse, perhaps The Curse’s strongest element is its gradual distancing from the “main character energy” that such films affect. Rather than deep-seated grudges, Ugana’s film treats such curses like spiritual weapons–folkloric guns that anyone can fire at a whim. Such indiscriminate malice already thrives online: just scroll any comments section to see strangers casually wish death and dismemberment on people they barely know.
These parasocial demons find eerie form in Ugana’s fusion of Taiwanese and Japanese folklore, as streamed da siu yan rituals summon red-clad, long-haired ghosts who unleash real-world havoc. Ugana honors the cinematic and cultural weight of this mythology while infusing it with the cruel, confrontational tone of Funny Games or even The Texas Chain Saw Massacre: the victims are targets, yes, but their very randomness is the point. It’s a horror both broader and sharper than classic J-Horror, in conversation with this year’s earlier generational terror Best Wishes to All: by merely existing in the wrong place at the wrong time, you can shatter someone’s peace—and invite a private, spiritual hell to come crashing down on you.
It takes most of The Curse’s runtime for its true intentions to surface, but the wait pays off in devilish due time. Ugana is quite adept at using the familiarity of his genre as a way to lull his audience into a false sense of security–that the jump scares and writhing possessions are the only things we can expect to bump in the night. The truth, realized in a menacing performance by Fan Jui Chun, is that someone somewhere, whom you’ve never met, thinks you’re the evil wrong with the world. As much as you’re trying to break a curse and live your best life–the scariest part is that so are they.
It’s quite a confrontational turn for a Japanese horror film, interrogating the unintentional solipsism at the core of these films. To break a curse is to affirm that we deserve to survive whatever horrors come our way. The Curse twists that instinct, using our hyper-connected, fatally parasocial world to show how easily we become the demon in someone else’s story…sometimes proving them right in the very act of fighting back. It’s a comically bleak vision of horror, nestled in a modest film with wicked reach–perfect for a world where our deadliest villains aren’t born of ancient curses or festering grudges, but conjured by the fickle whims of the Algorithm.
The Curse had its World Premiere at Fantastic Fest 2025, where it is currently seeking international distribution.
