Hashima Project

If you find this film confusing and difficult to follow, rest assured the language barrier has little if anything to do with it. Ditto cultural differences. The theme will be familiar to horror buffs, a group of teens or near teens visit a haunted house. In this case they visit it knowingly, but rather than a mere house this is a haunted city, and a real one to boot.

The island of Hashima is well known; it was once the most densely populated place on Earth, but was abandoned for commercial reasons in 1974. Our intrepid Thai adventurers visit the island, mobile phone cameras in hand, and then...

Hmm, well, there is the little matter of a ghost, a mysterious ring which one of them picks up then decides he wants to remove, using a pair of scissors to do so, and as he is drinking what looks like whisky, and is certainly drunk, you know exactly what is going to happen, and it does. He hacks off his finger. At this point, even the dumbest of the dumb would have picked up the finger and made off at breakneck speed to the nearest A&E, but not he. Not that he would have got far because this is where the side plot comes in; his domain is invaded by a terrestrial menace, a gang of armed thugs in pursuit of lucre, but the leader settles for raping one of the female members of the group, and stealing the ring. Bad move, as the gang get in their car, they are murdered in a drive-by shooting, clearly a professional hit, but could this be part of the curse?

The film is certainly atmospheric, but it tries too hard; the best thing about it is the music, as for the end, well, find your own meaning, reincarnation...?