Japanese horror has a storied history because its weaving of the country’s lineage of ghost stories, legends and yokai with the unnerving aspects of our modern world can thrill. It doesn’t matter if you have the budget of millions or you’re making it with a digicam and a dream, there’s the cultural roots that offer the embedded intrigue and unease to create a story that can equally frighten, engage, and unnerve. That being said, it’s only harder to thread that needle in an age of social media to find that balance.
The Curse is a film from Kenichi Ugana, director of The Gesuidouz but also, more directly in the field of horror, Visitors and Incomplete Chairs, looking to create a story dialed for the social media age. The solution of that is to create something that exudes from the endless scroll of social media, not too dissimilar to the concept spawning the cursed video tape in The Ring. This movie proves a strong inspiration for everything from the look of its evil spirit to the ideas it wishes to exude in this surprisingly multi-national horror piece, though I can’t help but feel the ambitions this might suggest are only let down by a story unable to match these ideas.
Riko (Yukino Kaizu) has been keeping up with the social media posts of her ex-boyfriend Jiahao’s (YU) partner, when one day an unnerving figure is noticed in the back of a recently-uploaded photo. It’s only when bringing it up to the partner that they find out a shocking truth: the woman has been dead for months, and the posts are all fake. Shocked and horrified by the thought, Riko and her roommate attempt to get her to stop, only to be bombarded by messages and a creepy video of a voodoo doll with their social media profile image plastered onto the head. As it bleeds, so does the roommate, and it’s only the start of a descent into madness.
It becomes clear, then, that the mysterious suicide of the friend’s partner is not all that it seems, and the mysterious video and the increasingly-deranged things happening to her roommate on the receiving end are linked. Left with little other choice and soon finding herself the next target, the only choice is to make the trip to Taiwan, the home of her ex and the seeming origin of this online curse, to maybe find a way to rid herself of it once and for all.
From a synopsis alone, it’s clear what the film seeks to explore across its time. Using the language of the horror genre, this seeks to update the stories portraying the rift and uneasy co-dependence between humanity and technology into a social media age. The terror, thus, is a manifestation of the destructive nature that this form of communication can lead to - behind anonymity, or at least a profile that may or may not be faked, it’s possible to say things and inflict pain and abuse you never would if you were face-to-face with that same person. That pain can fester and cause real harm the person inflicts on themselves, or against others.
The spirit in The Curse is clearly embodied in this idea, and this becomes apparent very early on. It’s also emblematic of the main issue this story has. Beyond this clear idea, the film doesn’t have many ways to enhance this story or evolve it, even when it takes the genuinely-refreshing move to make the story more international and tell the second half of its story in a foreign country. The move has merit, especially considering the global and online nature of social media and the way it connects beyond borders making it a valid thing to have in this story.
It just can’t take the concept beyond these surface-level ideas. We document our lives and augment reality and truth itself to portray a more perfect existence for people we know or may never meet, and yet if you placed our specter into any other horror story you wouldn’t have to change anything about their threat, their actions, how they look. Even the idea of voodoo feels almost out of place when something more reflective of the online world it wishes to discuss would seem to be more appropriate. Merely sending the video to the in-film character’s Instagram account is not enough.
This isn’t coming from an expectation that every story should have a level of depth, but if you choose to forego these aspects you have to have the gore and tension and horror live up to expectations and create a degree of tension that will allow you to forget about this while you’re watching. Something where you’ll think about the specter and the unease, or the disturbing moment that won’t leave your head, rather than the story once you’re home. I can’t fully say the story delivers on this aspect either, however.
Often the issue comes to how the horror is framed or shot. On the one hand, The Curse does a great job at subverting some expectations of the genre by removing the audience’s ability to anticipate an upcoming moment of shock or horror, occasionally building tension only to move on without a specter to make their appearance impossible to predict. The fact that, at times, the people in our lives can also be as much a thing to fear as this being, is also noted, leaving no moment to entirely relax.
Unfortunately, camera work often feels rushed, and the overall low budget of the production seeps into the at-times shoddy VFX replacing specific physical effects. Yet when all these moments have been seen before, from the homeless person who warns of the threat to the creature manifesting from the screen to the history of a broken home life and the retreat of the online world acting as its own form of abuse, you can’t help but confirm it to films that do it all so much better.
Often, editing can let the film down more than the ideas. As Rika’s roommate slips into madness, a moment intended to disturb and represent the way her mind has gone shocks her as she returns home. Only, the way the scene has been filmed and produced, it only becomes clear all-too-late when the initial shock no has gone what it all means, robbing the scene of the impact it could have had. This repeats itself in Taiwan, when we meet Jiahao and the family of his dead partner.
For a story that should feel so fresh, it feels so repetitive and trapped in the shadows of its inspirations, rather than the darkness of your mind. The horror of social media is that the curse is both ways - just as you may feel pain from someone else, it’s just as possible that pain is being felt in response by the way you act and live, and there’s no escape. There’s so much to explore that the genre has still not explored. The Curse, unfortunately, is not the film to break that trend.
