In short: The Samejima Incident (2020)

Original title: Sin Samejima Jiken

During the Corona lockdown. Nana (Rena Takeda) and a group of her former school buddies have an online drinking party to take a bit of the pressure off. Unfortunately, three of them have followed a website’s clues to the birthplace of a particularly curious urban legend, or rather, a terrible curse known as “The Samejima Incident”. Nobody knows much about said incident, for whoever hears the words “Samejima Incident” is already cursed and doomed to die. Obviously, Nana and the other of her friends who haven’t broken into some curse-bearing place will hear these words soon enough. Quickly, everyone finds themselves trapped in their own rooms, drenched in darkness only lit by the lights of their electronic devices, with something terrible picking the friends off one by one.

At least the internet works, so there’s perhaps a chance to find an out via good old internet research – about something that kills whosoever gets in contact with it.

This little pandemic set and made movie by Jiro Nagae certainly isn’t any great revelation to the long-time J-horror watcher. Its shocks are a little too generic, its plot a bit too silly, and its acting much too shouty for that.

Stylistically, The Samejima Incident has some interesting aspects to it, however. Nominally, this isn’t a POV horror movie, but it keeps so close to Nana and the things she sees on her devices, and uses so much footage from webcams, cell phone cams and shots of websites that it as well might be one. This isn’t something new, of course, and in part easily explained by this having been made under lockdown conditions, but I’ve seldom seen a movie that isn’t POV horror making this aesthetic shift in contemporary filmmaking quite this visible and obvious to me. All films are a bit POV horror now, as if they had been infected by the crazed spirit form of Koji Shiraishi.

Another interesting aspect about the film is that it makes explicit what has usually been implicit in movies about Japanese style curses (noroi): that they work like a virus, infecting – and potentially dooming – whoever they come in contact with, regardless of any morality or behaviour of the victims. That the film doesn’t do terribly much with this is somewhat unfortunate, but not surprising.

A little thought put into things is still appreciated, and consequently, I found myself pretty entertained by The Samejima Incident, despite its obvious shortcomings.