Weekly visions - week 33, 2026

貞子vs伽椰子 / Sadako vs. Kayako, written and directed by Koji Shiraishi, Japan, 2016 - ⭐⭐⭐

My Ringu-watch has finally brought me to the apotheosis of J-Horror, the Freddy vs. Jason of yōkai, the Alien vs. Predator of vengeful spirits.
The whole premise of the film sounds like an April Fools’ joke, and it actually was one until somebody decided that they would have been foolish not to try it.
That somebody was Noroi’s director, which somehow gives the project a thin veil of prestige, despite his name not being exactly a guarantee of quality (personal opinion).

Shiraishi cooks up a reboot of Ringu with the minimal amount of Ju-On required to honour the title, keeping the lore mostly untouched, except for a different cursed video - much less unsettling than the original one -, and a time-to-die deadline reduced to two days.
He then essentially recycles the middle section of his own Cult, and solves the battle of the demons (the Italian name for this film) in a very manga-like way.

The whole thing may still sound like a joke, but it worked for me, perhaps thanks to my extremely low expectations.
Both spirits (and Toshio!) were genuinely scary again, despite the ridiculousness of CGI prehensile hair and crazy eyes.

Now, if you are interested in cursed videos, you shouldn’t miss this one.

Song Sung Blue, written and directed by Craig Brewer, based on Greg Kohs’s documentary of the same name, US, 2025 - ⭐⭐⭐

Why a biopic about a cover band?
Because the story of Mike and Claire Sardina is so full of unlikely events that, if a screenwriter came up with it, they would be promptly sent back to their desk to make it more believable.
Or so we are told.
Because if you look at the details, of course the script changed some (not at all minor) facts in order to make them more dramatic.
And you wonder why I don’t like biopics.

I like Hugh Jackman, I like Kate Hudson; they are great performers, both as actors and, in this case, singers.
The first scenes when their characters start playing together are electrifying.
Then there’s a montage that will make you feel sick of Sweet Caroline’s pam, pam, pammm.
Then what follows is a drama with one remarkable scene involving a bottle of whisky, but which otherwise didn’t give me any emotional involvement.

It’s not a bad film - by the director of Hustle & Flow, Black Snake Moan and Coming 2 America -, but like most biopics, it’s completely inessential.
I suppose biopics are supposed to be inspirational, or cautionary tales, or just an excuse to try to reenact twenty minutes from a well-documented concert and somehow win a Best Actor Academy Award.
This one just tells us that we may receive an unexpected phone call or that accidents may happen and if there are enough of them, you may end up being played by Penny Lane.

It took me a while to recognise Michael Imperioli behind his Buddy Holly glasses.

Whistle, directed by Corin Hardy, written by Owen Egerton, based on his short story of the same name, US, 2025 - ⭐⭐½

After a parenthesis as the showrunner of Gangs of London, the director of The Hallow and The Nun returned to horror, and, despite not particularly liking either of the two films, it somehow got me excited.
At least until the reviews came in.

Whistle was adapted by screenwriter Egerton from his own original short story, which has nothing to do with M.R. James’ twice-adapted short story Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad , where a university professor finds an ancient whistle bearing a Latin inscription, blows into it, and is haunted by a supernatural presence.

In this case, a student (Dafne Keen) finds an ancient whistle bearing a Mayan inscription; the school’s professor (Nick Frost) blows into it, and soon is killed by a supernatural presence. Another student does the same, and soon his whole group of friends is cursed.

What follows is a Final Destination-ish teen slasher curse movie that touches many of the tropes of the subgenre(s), without much subtlety or respect for the audience: the rules are not that fixed - despite explanation being the only raison d’être of Michelle Fairley’s character.

I feel an incoming rant about curse movies but it requires spoilers, so, before getting there, let me tell you that, if you don’t care about originality or consistency and you can just ‘go with the flow’, it can be an enjoyable time: maybe the fact that professor Craven (yep) remembers Ancient Mayan from his school days is perfectly normal, after all.

Keen (especially once I stopped expecting her to show some superpower) and Sophie Nélisse give good performances, and there’s a wannabe tracking shot around the middle of the film that would have been great if it had been completed without a weird editing choice. Also, the addition of a peculiar character feels very functional to the ending of the story, but it mostly works.

Spoiler warning for the rest of this paragraph, about this film and curse movies in general.
For some viewers this will be the first curse movie, and they will thoroughly enjoy it.
But if you are familiar with the subgenre, at some point you can’t avoid wondering why screenwriters even bother. I mean, they have to eat, so probably that’s why. But isn’t it boring to always reuse the same solutions to deal with the curse?
For the last thirty years at least, movie curses are dealt with by either passing them onto someone else, or by cheating death (by voluntarily dying and being quickly resuscitated). Or both. More often than not, it doesn’t end well.
What’s worse, in the last ten years or so, scripts have started to ‘solve’ the film by just spreading the curse to many people at once. Isn’t this a sign of a selfish, broken society?

In fairness, mors tua vita mea - shrugging off concerns for other people when it serves us - is a millennia-old saying. I wonder whether the Mayans had a similar phrase.

The Owners, directed by Julius Berg, co-written with Mathieu Gompel, based on the graphic novel Une Nuit de Pleine Lune by Hermann and Yves H, France/United Kingdom, 2020 - ⭐⭐⭐½

I didn’t notice until now that I followed up a film featuring Lady Stark with one having her daughter Arya as the protagonist.

Maisie Williams is the most sensible person in a quartet of English youngsters who break into an isolated house looking to crack a very promising safe. But the film title makes it clear that the couple living there, a doctor and his frail wife (Sylvester McCoy and Rita Tushingham), are much less harmless than the invaders thought.

French director Berg adapts a 2011 graphic novel by Belgian father-and-son comic book writers Hermann and Yves Huppen, by moving it into a rural-England environment instead of keeping the Calvaire-style Wallonian ordeal.

Look, I’m not saying this is a great original story; the graphic novel precedes Don’t Breathe by a few years, but was released twenty years after Wes Craven’s The People Under the Stairs.
But, despite being just slightly less dark than Fede Álvarez’ film, it was very enjoyable: I chalk it up to the British charm of the old house and the ambiguous politeness of McCoy’s doctor (of course he has some experience in Doctor roles), as much as to Williams’ down-to-earth attitude.