I’ve got a bit of a soft spot for Japanese horror that takes something completely ordinary and finds a way to make it horrible, and The Curseseems like it takes that old J-horror idea of a curse and drags it straight into social media.
The film is directed and written by Kenichi Ugana, who has made some properly strange horror films, and this one is a Japanese-Taiwanese co-production made with members of the team behind the Taiwanese horror Incantation – ot premiered at Fantastic Fest in 2025 before its Japanese theatrical release on January 16, 2026, and runs for 94 minutes.
And I have to admit, the idea of a curse spreading through people’s phones is a pretty obvious modern update of Ringu, but I’m always up for it when somebody actually does something with the idea.
Riko Notices Something She Really Shouldn’t
Riko, played by Yukino Kaizu, works at a beauty salon in Tokyo when she starts noticing some very strange social media posts from her Taiwanese friend Shu-fen – there’s a woman in red appearing in the images, and then there are disturbing messages and videos, before people start dying.
Riko initially tries to help her friend, but after Shu-fen’s death she becomes convinced that what happened wasn’t simply suicide, so she contacts her Taiwanese ex-boyfriend Jiahao, played by YU, and eventually travels to Taiwan with him and Shu-fen’s sister Airi, played by Mimi Shao, to try to figure out what is actually happening.
And, obviously, once you’re investigating a supernatural curse that’s already killed people, the sensible thing to do would probably be to stop investigating.
Riko doesn’t.
That’s how we get a horror film.
Trailer
Kenichi Ugana Goes Back to J-Horror Territory
Kenichi Ugana writes and directs the film, with Hiroyuki Onogawa credited with the music, and the main cast includes Yukino Kaizu, YU, Mimi Shao, Shiho, Tammy Lin, Jui Chun Fan, Emma Hoeft, Yutaka Kyan, Mondo Otani, Reika Ozeki, Hironobu Nomura and Yasukaze Motomiya.
Ugana has already built up a reputation for making horror that isn’t particularly interested in behaving itself, and I think that’s useful here, because the premise sounds familiar, but the execution appears to be considerably weirder.
And that’s normally where I prefer my horror to be.
There’s a Bit of Ringu in Here
You can’t really talk about The Curse without mentioning Ringu – a mysterious supernatural threat, images that shouldn’t be there, people looking into something they don’t understand, and a curse that spreads.
It’s all very familiar territory.
But instead of a cursed videotape, Ugana is playing around with Instagram-style posts, messages, videos and online attention, which makes perfect sense in 2026.
The frightening thing about a cursed tape in Ringu was that you had to physically watch it, but now people spend half their lives scrolling through things without even thinking about what they’re looking at.
You could have a cursed video appear between somebody’s holiday photos and a stupid cooking reel and half the audience would probably watch it before realising something was wrong.
That’s actually a pretty good horror idea.
The Curse Is Also About Being Seen
One thing I find more interesting here than the basic supernatural mystery is the way the film connects the curse with social media attention – people post things because they want to be seen, they want reactions, they want followers, and they want somebody to click.
And horror has a nasty habit of taking perfectly normal behaviour and asking what happens when you push it too far, and this film apparently gets into the world of influencers, memes and posting for attention, so the social media element isn’t just a gimmick used to deliver the occasional creepy video – that gives the curse a modern reason to spread.
You don’t have to physically hand somebody a videotape anymore, you just share it, and then somebody else shares it, and then somebody else watches it, so that’s a much harder thing to stop.
But This One Gets Weird
Some of the reaction to the film suggests that it starts out as fairly recognisable J-horror before becoming considerably stranger, with some reviewsdescribing the later material as darkly comic, bizarre and almost dreamlike.
And I’m not sure I’d want it any other way.
If the whole film were simply Riko sees creepy woman, Riko investigates, creepy woman kills everyone, I’d probably be less interested, but Ugana seems to be leaning into something much more odd, and there are apparently moments where the film almost feels like a parody of the J-horror formula before pulling the rug out again.
Whether that was always the intention is difficult to say without watching it, but I like the sound of a horror movie that suddenly starts behaving strangely rather than following the same road all the way to the credits.
The Old Curse Has Found a New Delivery System
The folklore side is also interesting because the film doesn’t completely abandon the traditional idea of the curse – it’s still dealing with the fear that something supernatural can attach itself to people and follow them, but the method of transmission has changed.
The old horror movie version needed a physical object, but now the cursed object can be a piece of content that lives on a screen, which feels pretty appropriate for modern Japanese horror.
And the film’s Taiwan setting gives it another layer, particularly because the production has connections to Incantation and Taiwanese supernatural cinema, and The Curse does sounds like one of those films where I could either have a great time or sit there wondering what the hell Ugana was doing.
The reviews have been pretty mixed though, as some critics have enjoyed the way it updates J-horror, while others have found it uneven or too derivative of films like Ringu and Ju-On, but that doesn’t really put me off.
In fact, the fact that people seem to disagree about what sort of film this actually is has made me more interested – the social-media curse idea is familiar enough that I know what I’m getting into, but the Taiwanese setting, the Incantation connection and the apparently bizarre second half suggest there’s more here than the basic synopsis lets on.
I’m also quite interested in Yukino Kaizu in the lead because Riko seems to be carrying most of the investigation, and if she can sell the increasingly paranoid feeling of realising that something you saw on your phone might actually be connected to a string of deaths, that could work really well.
And if Ugana has managed to take that old cursed-media formula, throw it into the social-media age and then make the whole thing progressively more unhinged, I’m definitely willing to give it a go, because let’s face it, we’ve already spent years being told not to watch the cursed videotape.
Now apparently we have to worry about what we’re scrolling past as well.
Check out these other Japanese horror movies too.
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