Thanks Lowell for telling me to lower my expectations with this Gen Alpha meets ancient Japanese grudges J-horror.

I find horror of the suspenseful or supernatural kind a satisfying experience and this is one of the first films I booked at the Japanese Film Festival. Lowered hopes made it an enjoyable and briny ride.

Tomohiko (Daigo Nishihata) is your quintessential nerdy, wan gaming genius. Enticed to an island to work on a cutting edge VR research project, he’s immediately caught up in the mysterious deaths of the project chief, Ms Ide and one of her subjects, hermit-like Sonoda. Sonoda’s estranged daughter Tamaki (Yamamoto Mizuki) comes to collect his ashes and find herself stuck with Tomohiko in the weird alt-universe of small island life. We see glimpses of the ugliness of small minds stuck in old ideas of class, particularly where elderly handyman Shigeru (Takashi Sasano) is concerned.

The horror is the vengeful spirit of a women in red who emerges from the sea to drag the unsuspecting into dark depths. The vengeful female spirit is a well-worn trope – seen also in The Forbidden Play that I watched a few days earlier – and there is an interesting but depressing subtext of feminine power that is only possible after death, such is the gendered oppression. This feels like a story of community collusion and shame and reminded me of colonial culpability where no amount of whitewashing can hide the horrors of the past.

It’s set in a shabby-tech near future, with lots of exposed cabling and big VR headsets. Director Takashi Shimuzu is a veteran of Japanese horror and best know for The Grudge series – the Japanese originals (starting with Ju-on (2002)) and the first two US remakes. He obviously knows what he’s doing and gives us a decent amount of suspense, red herrings and jump scares. The intersection of VR and neuroscience provides opportunities to keep us off-kilter by confusing the real and the virtual and it kind of makes sense, although feels a bit messy in its narrative logic.

Although I enjoyed the ride, I’m not sure that this one will stick with me over time, perhaps because it feels like a chimera of so many other films of a similar ilk. There is a comfort in riffing off what we expect and love – the Scream franchise has proven that to a point – but also a longing to be picked up and shaken around by the unexpected.

Have you seen this? What did you think?