The Curse (film)

Noroi (The Curse) (呪い) is a 2005 J-Horror film in the form of a mockumentary. The movie is unusually long and complex for the J-Horror genre, spanning over two hours and having a main cast of well over twenty-five characters.

Plot

The movie begins in a video editing room, where a voiceover narrator briefly describes Masafumi Kobayashi, a paranormal expert who produced a series of books and movies on supernatural activity around Japan. The movie then explains that he disappeared in the process of making his greatest and most disturbing film yet, "The Curse", and the aforementioned movie begins to play.

The movie begins with Kobayashi's investigation of a woman named Junko Ishii and her unnamed son, brought about when Kobayashi was contacted by her next-door neighbour. Soon after Kobayashi makes his first visit, however, Ishii moves out of the apartment, and the neighbours that contacted Kobayashi die in a freak car accident. Ishii is not seen or mentioned until the film's denoument.

The first half of the movie then depicts a steadily unfurling series of seemingly unrelated events, including the disappearance of a psychic child, a Television personality making complex loops of string in her sleep, a mass suicide where the participants hang by similarly knotted string, and many more equally bizarre occurrences.

The multitude of events do not seem to have any commonality to one another, until the second part of the movie begins. Here, it becomes apparent that all of the events relate to a mysterious entity known only as Kagutaba.

Kobayashi's quest to find the truth brings him to a regional area of Kyoto, where many years prior a very religious town once stood. The town performed an annual ritual to contain Kagutaba, until it was demolished to construct a dam.

As the movie comes to a close, each character's relationship with Kagutaba becomes apparent, and the many individual stories and narrative threads draw to a single climactic conclusion.

True to the movie's tagline-"Everybody dies"(みんな死んで)-most of the primary cast dies by the conclusion of the film. After Kobayashi's film has ended, we return to the video editing room, where the voiceover continues that Kobayashi and his family were killed in a fire mere days after the events of the film. In addition, several other characters have since died in bizarre and unexplainable methods, including one character being found in a ventilation shaft.

The voiceover then announces that footage from Kobayashi's camera was anonymously mailed to a television station, and this footage is then played. It depicts Kobayashi and his wife eating dinner with the son of Junko Ishii, whose name is still unknown. After a series of events more heard than seen (thanks to the disorienting movement of the camera), the camera stabilises to show Kobayashi's wife, apparently under curse or possession, casually light herself on fire, as Junko Ishii's son leaves the room.

The voiceover then announces that Kobayashi's wife was found in the remains of the burnt-down house, but neither Kobayashi nor the mysterious boy have been seen. The film ends ambiguously here, with a short clip from the film's chilling climax quickly flashing onto the screen followed immediately by the credits.

The movie is shot entirely with a DV camera, both to simulate the home-made documentary feeling and to save budget space for marketing; the movie had an atypically large amount of advertising for a movie of its budget and genre.

Reception

The movie received generally very high reviews, though some critics were displeased by its unusually long and complicated plotline. However, this departure from the typical J-Horror template found favour with most critics, particularly those who specialise in the Horror genre. The movie has not been rated on Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic as of January 2008.