It’s not an uncommon practice for a filmmaker to release two films in a year. John Huston released The Treasure of the Sierra Madre the same year as Key Largo (1948), Akira Kurosawa released Scandal in the same year as Rashoman (1950), John Hughes released The Breakfast Club and Weird Science in the same year (1985), and Steven Spielberg released Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List in the same year (1993), to name a very small sample. Having already celebrated the world premiere of his rom-com I Fell in Love with a Z-Grade Director in Brooklyn during Fantasia International Film Festival 2025, writer/director Ken’ichi Ugana (The Gesuidouz) unveils his latest horror project, The Curse (咒死你), during Fantastic Fest 2025. This is not the first time that Ugana comes to Fantastic Fest with a world premiere as 2023 saw the debut of Visitors (Complete Edition), the horror comedy feature inspired by his prior short. Now, however, Ugana goes full-on J-horror, utilizing elements of onryō tales to craft a gruesome, blood-soaked, and totally unexpected ride that’ll unsettle you to the last frame.
Noticing something strange with her friend Shufen’s (Tammy Lin) recent photo post and unable to contact her, Riko (Yukino Kaizu) reaches out to her own ex-boyfriend Jiahao (YU) living in Taiwan near Shufen to see if he knows anything. To her horror, she learns that Shufen died six months prior, a fact made more chilling as someone keeps posting to the account. Sharing her concern, Riko’s roommate Airi (Reika Oozeki) attempts to confront the false-Shufen online and receives a disturbing video as a result which, upon watching, results in Airi’s eyes beginning to bleed profusely and a malignant presence making itself known, kicking off Aira’s slow torture before dying. In trying to uncover the mystery of Shufen’s death and Airi’s torture, Riko will team up with Jiahao to uncover the source of the curse in hopes of preventing it from taking any more lives.
In truth, my experience with Ugana began earlier this year with The Gesuidouz (2024) as I was unable to cover Visitors during Fantastic Fest 2023. Though it’s inherently maudlin with its lead character determined to die by her next birthday in order to achieve the same Rock God status of her musical heroes, The Gesuidouz is perpetually irreverent and absurd, including but not limited to one character getting addicted to bean cake and talking cassette tapes. Though a certain whimsy still exists within Ugana’s script for The Curse, creating moments that elicit laughter, the film is by no-means a comedy. Its intention, instead, appears to be to analyze the now-common always-online existence of humanity and how it opens one up to violence, using the unexpected to startle audiences into facing their addictions. There was a time in which carrying a portable device with you that can record, photograph, contact, and track in real-time was a thing of science fiction, an impossibility due to the technological feats required. Yet, through the mobile phone’s evolution from requiring a hulking backpack to weighing a meager 130-200 grams, not only did the fantastical become realized, it created untold problems in the way that people engage with the world. Suddenly there’s a fascination with always putting the best parts of ourselves forward, leaving others to only see another’s highlight reel, all the while forgetting that you do the same. Thus, a horrible cycle is born in which posting all of our thoughts, all of our feelings, transient and shallow as they may be, to a space in which they become immortalized in 1s and 0s for others to process and take as gospel. Through his script, Ugana upends the casualness with which audiences view posting, here being specifically photos, as the information within them, even innocuous, is sharpened into weapons against the poster — and this is all happening even before our narrative kicks off and the blood pours. While likely not part of Ugana’s aim, The Curse can be explored both within the traditional Japanese horror onryō stories (those of vengeful spirits) *and* as the curse we place upon ourselves by creating digital avatars that are accessible by the world 24/7/365. (An entire article could be written from the perspective of social media’s algorithm being a feeding machine that similarly sucks and feeds from a person as a curse does, but that’s not the intention of this review today.)
Yukino Kaizu as Riko in THE CURSE. Photo courtesy of Fantastic Fest/Rights Cube.
Where the film truly succeeds is in the way that the frights come. Modern audiences are primed for the kinds of frights that come from onryō stories whether they’re spectral visions and torn faces (The Tale of Oiwa’s Ghost), the disturbing appearance of faceless long hair (The Ring), or surprise specters (The Exorcist III), and Ugana leans into expectation while also creating startling moments of his own. The cold open, for instance, utilizes the expected appearance of a hand slowing moving into frame from beyond the purview of the unknown victim before caressing her face, an act of violence upon the already terrified girl. The spirit, portrayed by Shiho (We Are Aliens), isn’t fully shown to us until Airi’s curse is activated, and is dressed in costume akin to other frights in modern onryō tales (long hair; one-piece, long dress with long sleeves) and has Kabuki design makeup upon their face. This presentation, alongside the way it chokes its victims, leans into audience expectations in terms of standard issue horror tropes, setting the stage for the audience to relax, creating a false relief that Ugana can then use to unseat them. Don’t mistake this to mean jump scares, which are often the uninspired, low-hanging fruit of horror, though there is a gloriously executed one involving Riko. The scares come more from twisting expectations, such as placing the spirit where one couldn’t imagine them to appear or the arrival of characters in extended sequences doing the unthinkable, and other incorporations of the physically impossible in order to convey just how truly endangered Riko is until the curse is lifted.
Where the film falters somewhat is two-fold — the overall look of the film and the delivery from the cast. Wherein The Gesuidouz benefited from cinematography that was even throughout, anchoring the strange events of the film in a semblance of a coherent and consistent reality, there’s no shift or adjustment within the visual framing of The Curse. There’s no sense of dread infused in the framing, no signal of disquiet nor visual language conveying the otherworldliness of the circumstance. This may be a specific choice to affix The Curse within a real-world frame, playing into the thematic elements of the door being opened to malevolence through everyday action in digital spaces, but it never comes across this way. Additionally, while cast members Kaizu, Shiho, Mimi Shao (credited as Shao Yi Mei) (Your Name Engraved Herein), and Ray Fan (Bad Girl Trilogy) generally offer performances in-tune with the narrative, as a whole, there’s a greater sense of the cast reading lines than authentically existing in the moments of their story. This could be explained as social awkwardness within the intentional absurdity of The Gesuidouz, but it’s harder to engage with in the far-straighter narrative here. Neither of these things inhibit audience enjoyment, yet they are difficult to ignore once noticed.
Even as The Curse hews closely to the subgenre that inspires it, the film manages to make something horrifying all on its own, a tale that should make any modern audience wary of their digital footprint. The blending of superstition and cultural customs with modern aspects (whatever constitutes “modern” for the release date) is by no means new, but, when done well, it creeps under the audience’s skin, evoking the kind of dread that doesn’t wash away immediately after the story is completed. That’s what Ugana accomplishes here with his full-on onryō story as it relishes in the carnage it creates and the wake it leaves behind.
Screening during Fantastic Fest 2025.
For more information, head to the official Fantastic Fest The Curse webpage.
Final Score: 3.5 out of 5.
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Categories: In Theaters, Reviews
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