You'll have to forgive me today if this review goes into strange places; I'm writing it after seeing Blade Runner 2049 at the cinema - a beautiful 2 hour 37 minute movie that nethertheless left my brain slightly fried from all the sumptuous cinematography and set design and all the sudden loud noises that kept happening on top of that. If I'd planned things better I'd have considered whether reviewing Noroi: The Curse straight after seeing a film like that was actually a wise idea, as that film isn't exactly easy to follow either. Ah well, nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Masafumi Kobayashi is a paranormal expert and investigator who has made a number of documentaries on his investigations into the paranormal. The Curse is presented to us as his final documentary, as he disappeared during the making of it after his house burned down and his wife we found dead in the ruins. The unfinished documentary gradually shows us what happened... Kobayashi began by investigating strange noises coming from a house; shortly thereafter he learns that the woman who lived there, Junko Ishii, and her son had suddenly moved out and the people who had reported the noises had died suddenly. Next he investigates a young psychic girl, Kana Yano, who demonstrated her abilities on a television show and then disappeared shortly after. Then he interviews another psychic, Hori, who wears and decorates his house with tinfoil to protect himself from "ectoplasmic worms". Meanwhile an actress appearing in a paranormal show, Marika Matsumoto, becomes connected to a malevolent spirit and starts creating looped nooses, and this is where everything starts to become connected as similar nooses were seen at Junko Ishii's house and both Kana and Hori drew similar loops as part of their psychic tests. As Kobayashi investigates deeper, he discovers connections with a demon called Kagatuba, who used to have an annual ritual performed to appease him, but not since 1978 when the village that performed the ritual was relocated to build a dam. As more and more people start dying or disappearing, Kobayashi must discover the truth about Kagatuba's ritual and find a way to appease him before it's too late...
The director of Noroi: The Curse (sometimes it's just known as The Curse but I feel better using the full title) is Kôji Shiraishi, and we've reviewed another of his films on this blog before - Sadako vs Kayako. So that's a tonal shift right there to start with. While Sadako vs Kayako was very much a tongue-in-cheek film, Noroi is a dead serious one. It was also made much earlier in Shiraishi's career - his second film, in fact - and was made during a time when he seemed to have a keen focus on both found footage/mockumentary films and in Asian urban legends. I have to say, after watching Noroi I have a real interest in seeing some of the director's other works - even (or especially) the one that got banned in the UK, Grotesque.
One reason Noroi: The Curse is better than a lot of supernatural found-footage movies is that it's played completely straight. With so many other films of this nature, the action is centred around a "ghost hunting" team of some sort, usually comprised of the type of people you'd only watch on television for the humour value or to see get massacred by an angry spirit (which, to be fair, is how most of these films turn out). The characters in Noroi, however, have none of that annoying bombast or cockiness. Even the theoretically most annoying character, Hori, doesn't fall into the trap of being reduced to a comedy character - we might pity him because we're relatively sure he's mentally ill for a lot of the film, psychic or not, but he's not presented as someone to laugh at. The investigation is also drawn out over days, even weeks, rather than being crammed into one frantic night, and it really lets the dread creep up as the film progresses and we learn more about what is really going on. The way that several seemingly random, unrelated incidents and people - Junko Ishii, Kana and Marika, for example - are slowly revealed to be more and more connected is also quite enthralling.
Noroi: The Curse didn't scare me; not in the way that films in the past like Ghostwatch and The Last Broadcast did - but then again I've seen a lot since then and learned a lot more about this genre that probably makes me wise to some of its tricks. But it did stay with me after I finished watching it, and while I was watching it I did feel an ever-growing sense of dread as things progressed and the situation became more and more dire. It tells a good story, despite it maybe seeming overly long and complicated to some, and it maintains a creepy atmosphere without resorting to a lot of the usual CGI "ghost" effects that are prominent in other films of this nature.
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