It's better than it seemed for a while. About half an hour in, I was finding it easy to watch but a bit repetitive. J-horror ghosts pull people through doors and off railway platforms. They die. Fair enough, but the characters aren't that interesting. Rinse, repeat. We've seen all this before. The storyline involves a ghost who haunts trains and wants people to return something or other. If they don't, they get murdered and come back as yet more killer ghosts. There's nothing wrong with that, but this kind of horror-driven storyline is liable to sideline the protagonists.

Also, the acting was a problem. It's almost always okay, but a bland, low-grade sort of "okay" that's not actually good. Erika Sawajiri is passable as the heroine, Nana, but I didn't believe for a moment that I was looking at a teenage girl who's lost her six-year-old sister.

The last act, though, gets more interesting. Nana had been planning to study abroad at Miskatonic University, which is a WHAT THE HELL?!? in a run-of-the-mill J-horror ghost film. Are things about to get Lovecraftian? That would be a lot weirder. The finale has spooky tunnels with weird idols and an unexplained horned presence. I like to think that was Sutekh. There's a mountain of fossilised children's corpses, except that all the words there get proved wrong. The door to the afterlife becomes two-way. Even the varieties of undead aren't as predictable as I'd thought. Ghosts? Yes, obviously, but there will be good ghosts alongside the scary killer ones. Zombies? Possibly, towards the end, if you're getting technical. Vampires? No, because no blood is drunk, but some of those grey deformed faces reminded me of them.

That last act woke me up after the preceding "okay but routine" J-horror. There's also a one-eyed vengeance woman, a ghost who gets ghost-killed, a crying baby covered in blood (ewww) and lots of ghost handprints appearing on a car's rear window. Spoiler: that's a bad sign for the car's passengers.

The cast are sort of okay. Erika Sawajiri is likeable and relatable, despite being not very good. (The actress in real life is far more colourful, for what it's worth, and had a habit of derailing her career with controversial statements and eighteen-month prison sentences for drug use.) There are some loud, hard-to-like teens, but one of them becomes likeable anyway. There's also a train driver who gets demoted for seeing dead women on the tracks.

This film is uneven, but I ended up quite liking it anyway. It's got more personality than I'd expected and it's definitely one of Takeshi Furusawa's better movies (although I enjoyed ReLIFE). If he made a sequel to this, I'd watch it.