MOVIE REVIEW

RATING: 8/10

When you've been a dedicated follower of the horror genre for long enough, all of it starts becoming quite predictable. You start picking up all the clues along the length of the movie that will be put together in the end by the protagonist just before s/he dies from a fatal realization to build the climax; you know it in your guts when a badly made up scary face is going to jump into the screen; and you most definitely know that everything happens because characters JUST DON'T WANT TO SWITCH THE LIGHTS ON IN A DARK ROOM WHEN THEY ENTER IT. I mean, what is up with these people?

To break the monotony and to help you try out something different, I've backtracked a bit. Here is Noroi—The Curse, a 2005 Japanese Horror film that is generally acclaimed to be quite unusual for J-horror. 'Found-footage' style mockumentaries hit us for the first time via Hollywood around 2008 with Cloverfield, but such mockumentaries were already being made elsewhere, and Noroi is one of them.

Noroi is a documentary that screens and talks about the makings of another documentary on supernatural events investigated by popular paranormal reporter, Masafumi Kobayashi, along with the help of his cameraman, Miyajima. Kobayashi is well known for researching and publishing books and documentaries on supernatural and paranormal cases. The movie begins with the foreword that the viewer is about to watch his life's last released documentary, soon after the release of which Kobayashi's house was found burnt to ashes, his family killed, and he was nowhere to be found & thereby reported missing.

The documentary of subject begins with Kobayashi investigating reports of disturbing noises arising from a house at night. The owner of the house is found to be an eccentric woman named Junko Ishii, who lives there with her young son and is quite antagonistic to Kobayashi's probing. Soon after that encounter, Ishii is found to have moved out of the house to an unknown location while Kobayashi makes interesting new observations on the case. On a different case, an actress named Marika Matsumoto, who believes she has a sixth sense, has a terrifying experience whilst filming with a reality TV show crew at a shrine. The footage of her experience at the shrine is later discussed in a panel including Kobayashi himself and a very powerful but clearly disturbed psychic, Mitsuo Hori, who panics at the sight of Matsumoto and attacks her as he warns her of impending dangers. Matsumoto is later haunted and discovers that she has been sleepwalking and unconsciously forming knots of a particular style. In another case that seems unrelated at first, a young child, Kana Yano, is discovered to possess psychic powers in a television show. Upon further research on her, Kobayashi finds that she has been having strange experiences and lapses since the filming of the episode, and is being visited by Hori as well. Soon after, she is reported to have disappeared from her home. Eventually, in one of the footages of Matsumoto's sleepwalking episodes, a strange voice is picked up saying, 'Kagutaba'. This begins a search for 'Kagutaba', which leads everyone down history and connects all these cases and people, only to reach an unexplained conclusion that is shown after Kobayashi's documentary ends.

It is very well made as a mockumentary and almost appears believable as it features an abnormally large number of protagonists with equally appreciable roles in the movie. Quite complex and hard to make proper sense of ultimately, it does seem to drag a bit and go slow in certain parts of its 115 minutes running time. But that also adds to its character of being a make-believe documentary, just as the convincing acting does.