Do not call the well – Newspaper Kommersant No. 235 (7436) dated 12/17/2022

Hisashi Kimura’s horror film “The Curse: Unraveling” (Sadako DX) was released. This is at least the fourteenth film in a quarter of a century, inspired by the horror story of Koji Suzuki, about the mystical girl Sadako, once thrown into a well by evil people and taking revenge on humanity with the help of cursed videotapes. Mikhail Trofimenkov, having looked at “The Curse”, he did not understand what he saw.

Sadako apparently spent many years traveling overseas, filming the American and South Korean remakes of The Ring. In any case, Japan, which she returned to terrify, does not look like the land of tomorrow’s technology. Except maybe a quarter of a century ago. The Japanese still watch the film on VHS. Ancient VCRs are at best hidden in a pantry, where they are easy to get.

True, the charlatan-sorcerer Kenshin (Hiroyuki Ikueto) sings on television. Say, just imagine what will happen if someone puts a deadly video on the network, it’s hundreds of millions of people who will die. But for some reason, no one uploads the video: apparently, there is no access to the Internet in the Sadako well. The loss of the 125 millionth population of Japan is limited to four and a dozen people – it is strange that anyone noticed them at all. Yes, and they die rather funny than sinful. First, as first-year students of the theater institute, performing sketches with imaginary objects, they are trying to free themselves from the invisible, suffocating hair of Sadako. Then they perform a mandatory somersault over the head and freeze.

The young Ayaka (Koshiba Fuka), who has, whatever that means, IQ-200, must save the nation from the curse. Her intellectual abilities prove that Ayaka apparently remembers the Guinness Book by heart. In any case, he remembers who, according to Guinness, had the longest hair in the world. Discourages a would-be suicide from jumping off a rooftop by giving him a brief lecture on the kinetic velocity of a fall. And he knows how to open, smart girl, the right page on Wikipedia in order to find out what a virus is, and based on this knowledge, build a strategy to combat Sadako. Although what does the virus have to do with it: no one posted the video on the network. And to forbid idiots to rewrite and watch VHS, so that later with wild cries they rush around the screen, begging to save them from damage, not a single doctor can do it.

On-screen characters claim that they are so scared, so scared that they can’t even eat – this is not a metaphor. Particularly successful in this is Oji (Kazuma Kawamuri), Ayaka’s partner who watched the video and is now counting the hours separating him from the hour of death: in the first “Calls” Sadako’s victims died in a week, now – in a day. Oji yells in horror at the sight of a waitress who brought him a cup of coffee, or a passerby with long hair like Sadako’s.

But even without Oji, the on-screen broadcast is filled with lamentations. “Oh, I’m so scared!” “Oh, it’s her, it’s her!” “She came for me!” If the audience had at least a thousandth of the fear experienced by on-screen teenagers, “The Damnation” would be the most terrible horror story in world cinema.

However, the strength of teenage decibels, not backed up by any really scary – or even just spectacular – scene, leads only to a gloomy thought. Are we watching a parody? Or worse, a Japanese teen comedy. We do not know this genre at all, but it probably exists, but if this is its model, then thank God that we do not know.