Kotodama: Spiritual Curse is made up of three interconnected stories. One part of the movie concerns first year students at Kitayamda Middle School. The students tell scary stories to each other about the abandoned classroom next door, and soon fall victim to paranormal threats that seem to be drawn directly from their words. In another part of the film, a group of filmmakers sneak into an abandoned building to shoot a viral video, and run into a real ghost. And finally, a young woman tries to fulfill her mother's final wishes, digging into her past to male peace with a tragic event from the past.
This movie is very bizarre, and that’s mostly a good thing. The rhythms of J-Horror are so worn out and familiar at this point that much of its edge has been lost. Horror tends to benefit from the unknown, and the endless use of the same tropes over and over again tend to make things less exciting than they could be. But Kotodama, while still using many of these tropes, is actually playing a very different game. It bends space and time as it tells a pretty wacky story that wields illogic as a weapon. It’s just too bad that the version we’re getting is technically inferior.
It should be said right away: the Tagalog dubbing of this film is pretty terrible. The SineAsia dubbing has been pretty hit or miss, but generally they seem to be at least professionally done. But the seams are showing at every corner of this film. There are scenes where you can still hear the original Japanese dialogue. And there’s more than one sequence where the dubbing really steps on the film’s sound design. Practically all the SineAsia releases have some problems with the sound design, but this film seems to be particularly bad with it. There are whole scenes that just go without sound effects altogether. And there are some lines of dialogue that they seem to have forgotten to dub.
It’s a shame, because this is actually a pretty intriguing picture. It’s often so weird that it just becomes unsettling. The movie exhibits little regard for keeping the audience in the loop. It just throws out scene after scene of horror weirdness, doing very little to indicate what it is that holds all of these together. It should feel frustrating, but it isn’t. The movie establishes right from the start that this isn’t going to be a typical experience. It isn’t trying to put together a simple three-act story. It just wants to keep ramping up the weirdness until the whole thing breaks apart.
But it just isn’t worth seeing in this state. Sound design is a huge part of horror films, and to have whole chunks of it just disappear isn’t right. This whole initiative to dub these Asian movies in Tagalog has been questionable right from the start, but I’ve been willing to give the whole thing the benefit of the doubt. But this film is so sloppily dubbed that it’s hard to give SineAsia a pass. If we really need to have these films dubbed in Tagalog, then they need to at least be done well. The bad dubbing just kills whatever appeal this film might have had.
Kotodama: Spiritual Curse is kind an intriguing. It is so outright bizarre that I actually want to see it again. But I’m not going to head into cinemas for my repeat viewing. It just isn’t worth spending the money for a product that is so sloppily made. What hurts is that it isn’t the movie’s fault at all. This film suffers because it had to go through the extra process of Tagalog dubbing. The film is showed utter disrespect as its components are ruined by bad recording. They’ve done better before, and these films deserve better.
My Rating:
