THE CURSE (2025)

3 stars

Blue Finch Film Releasing. UK and Ireland digital platforms. 13 July

The film opens, as many do, with a frightened, distressed girl running from something. It doesn’t end well. Writer/Director Kenichi Ugana also sets his grisly stall out in this early sequence.

Riko (Yukino Kaizu) works in a hairdressers as a receptionist. She scrolls the socials on her break. She thinks she sees something in the background of an Instagram post by her friend Shufen, who has gone back to Taiwan. Rather alarmingly the caption reads ‘Drop dead already. All of you’. She phones her but guess no answer.

Encouraged by her flatmate Airi (Mimi Shao) and somewhat worried, she phones her ex boyfriend Jiahao (Yu Teng Yang), who is also in Taiwan, to see if he knows anything. She asks about the strange post – and discovers her friend died six months ago. An unnatural death with some saying she was cursed. She insists that kind of thing doesn’t exist but he tells her curses are very real in Taiwan – but who has been updating her account?

When her flatmate Airi messages the account, she gets a flood of threatening responses and a weird video of an effigy with her face on being smashed with a hammer… then freakily blood seeps down her face from her eyes. Has she been cursed also?

Before long more strange things start to occur. Can they escape the jinx? If all this talk of videos and curses sounds kind of familiar, this is, at least initially, a modern take on movies like THE RING and JU-ON, however this isn’t the more subtle long haired girl haunting people as Ugana has created a much more visceral and gory contemporary outing with plenty of blood spattered. In the finale it becomes a slasher movie though it does veer into the ridiculous.

Steve Kirkham