It's garbage, but it would have been fine if they'd cast an actress in the lead role. They didn't. Instead, they cast Mariya Suzuki, a singer who appears on the posters and in the end credits as "Mariya Suzuki (AKB48)" to underline that she's a member of the idol girl group AKB48. She's pretty, but comes across as vapid. Some might say "stupid". She can manage dialogue with another actor, but she can't carry solo scenes, her reaction shots are often inadequate and she doesn't project mental activity. After her mother dies, her level of visible distress suggests that she's wondering where she left the TV remote control.

She irritated me. I wanted her gone from the film. The rest of the cast is a mixed bag, with some respectable older actors (e.g. a schoolteacher) but also a boy closer to her age who's nearly as bad as her. The film only finds weight in the scene with an old lady who'd lost her son many years ago. She was good.

There's also misjudged CGI. The death faces are good, but the black ghost smoke is overdone and a finger catching fire will only make you say "oh look, CGI".

There's a spooky scene where Mariya has a conversation with a woman who a minute or two later is revealed to be a corpse. She'd hanged herself. We were talking to her ghost. This is a cool idea, but ludicrous since she'd committed suicide a few days earlier. The implication is that her adult son left her hanging there in the living room without taking her down, alerting the police, etc.

The film's quite good at startling you. They're not quite jump scares, but you'll see things you weren't expecting. I also quite like the script, which is simple but does the job. Many years ago, there was bullying at a primary school. This ended in a girl pushing a boy off a wall, after which everyone walked away and left him to die. He wasn't dead yet at that point. He couldn't walk and he was calling "help me". Today, many years later, his decayed body has been found and his now-grown-up killers are about to die from a curse that will even affect their children. That's fine by me if it means getting rid of Mariya.

The Kokkuri-san stuff (i.e. Japanese ouija boards) is usually kept in the background, which works well. Almost an hour passes before Mariya herself tries to summon Kokkuri-san, which builds up a certain level of expectation.

Theoretically, I should have liked this film... but my notes refer to Mariya Suzuki as "Can't Act Girl" and to Keisuke Yamagata as "Can't Act Boy". Nope. Mariya kills this movie. Your response to the horror twist ending is likely to be "doomed after all, ahahaha".