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*Spoiler alert. Actually, the ending is really cool, so maybe see the movie before reading the review*
I suspect that ever since the first Sumerians carved their cuneiform into clay tablets, there has been a desire amongst certain people to turn the written word into a deadly curse. If words are magical (and any animist and anyone with OCD can tell you that they are), then written words are the most efficacious kind, because they have material reality and permanence. The theme of a book that will kill its reader pops up in different places in modern literature. I am thinking specifically of Miroslav Pavic�s The Khazar Dictionary, which makes prominent use of a poisoned book, and Enrique Vila-Matas�s Never Any End to Paris, in which he discusses a book he wrote in his youth that was supposed to kill its readers (and I think he actually did write that book, but it has not been translated into English yet; oh, and it probably doesn�t actually kill the reader; I feel like it would be more well-known if it did). There�s also a J. G. Ballard story somewhere, the name of which escapes me right now, which concludes with the revelation that reading the story will cause one to die (and, knock on wood, but I read that like four years ago and I�m still alive).
All of this is some background context for Mari Asato�s 2011 film Gomennasai (or Gomen nasai), released in the US with the idiotic title Ring of Curse. But don�t let said title fool you, as this is an excellent movie, and the first Japanese horror film I�ve seen in a long time that doesn�tfeature jump scares or the typical long-haired, pale-skinned, water-logged Asian horror movie ghost (�Japanese floaty girl� is how they describe her in the end credits of The Cabin in the Woods). Gomennasaiis about a put upon Japanese high school student name of Kurohane-san who seeks revenge against her awful classmates (not so much her teachers, whom we almost never see; the students spend most of their time at school in unsupervised �self-study� sessions). She does this by means of her cursed writing, which will kill anyone who reads it, and the movie follows her attempts to disseminate it and the attempts of our hero, Yuka, to defeat her.
Now, perhaps the most satisfying thing about this movie is that we have in Yuka a protagonist who gets it, and who has the critical thinking skills necessary to figure out what needs to be done to survive a horror movie. After being cursed along with several other girls, who begin to die one by one, Yuka, who knows her shit, realizes that the curse doesn�t kill in the order of exposure to it. So if A is cursed, and then B, and then C, it doesn�t necessarily mean that A will be killed before B and B before C. It could go BAC, or CAB, etc. And so Yuka, harnessing the power of statistics, decides that her best hope for survival can actually be found in actively spreading the curse to as many people as possible. Because if ten people are cursed, then her chances of dying are one in ten. If one hundred people are cursed, one in one hundred. If one thousand are cursed� well, you get the idea. At the end, she tells us that she has spread the curse so effectively that the odds of dying from it are less than the odds of getting in a fatal car accident. Also, by watching the movie, and reading the opening credits, we the viewers have also been cursed, and it is in our interests to get as many people to watch the movie as possible. Now that�s clever. Yuka actually spreads the curse far beyond what Kurohane-san could have achieved on her own. It�s not the sort of cold and calculating conduct we expect from our �final girls,� but they would be well advised to follow Yuka�s lead in future. Or at least to familiarize themselves with the laws of statistics.
