The Curse ★★★★☆

This review contains spoilers.

I don’t think I’ve ever turned around this much on a film in the last five minutes. It goes from being absolute trash (😠) to being absolute trash (🥰) at incredible speed.

Most of the movie is a very derivative and not particularly competent horror, featuring the classic horror movie monster Sadako-but-in-a-red-dress stalking a woman who got cursed through Instagram. It really starts to feel like there is no salvaging the film after the protagonist travels to Taiwan (where curses are real) and the hauntings become more and more comical, but in hindsight that may have been intentional. Once the protagonist and her ex-boyfriend track down the Taiwanese Instagram witch the film quickly becomes hilarious. It turns out that this woman has been cursing people to be killed by red Sadako simply because she hates their posts so much, and whomst among us has not wished they could do the same?

I don’t think I do the climax justice with a brief description, but Taiwanese Instagram witch invites the protagonist and her ex-boyfriend in for rancid tea the ex stumbles upon her precious pile of dead bodies in the back, at which point she chases them with a machete until they curse her with the same method she had used on them. Red Sadako seemingly turns on TIW and starts to strangle her, but is interrupted by the ex trying to personally punch her to death instead. The protagonist then tells him to stop because punching a woman to death with his bare hands is “gross”, and then starts to photograph the body of the woman he just tried to kill for an Instagram post. When she turns her back, TIW gets up, decapitates her with a single swing and kills the boyfriend too.

In the final, lingering, static shot of the film, TIW makes some tea to enjoy in her back garden, takes the protagonist’s phone, starts scrolling through her Instagram, then I guess locks herself out of the phone by accident because she goes back in and cuts off the girl’s arm off-camera to use her fingerprint to unlock the phone again, which she uses to play music off of so that she can dance to it in her garden. Cut to credits. A short flash of a post-credits scene shows Red Sadako dancing along in the celebration of killing bad posters. I love you Taiwanese Instagram witch.