Disclaimer: Contains spoilers!
Plot Summary: Five classmates reunite 8 years after their friend disappeared, while playing a supernatural game, only to be picked off one by one.
Review: This is another instance of wasted potential, and it sucks too because the story was really interesting up to a certain point. For some reason the film decided to start introducing pointless red herrings and made a simplistic story needlessly convoluted. This isn't to say the movie is inherently bad, as there were a great deal of cool ideas and an imaginative plot, but they lost focus at one point and the ending is seriously lackluster. In fact, the ending manages to pull off that weird scenario where you didn't see the twist coming, yet was strangely predictable nonetheless, and instills a big "meh" reaction; hopefully you get what I'm talking about in this regard.
I'll try and sum the film up coherently as there are multiple tangents that serve no purpose. Eight years ago, six friends, roughly age 12, were playing some urban legend-esque game called "oyayubi sagashi." The game is sort of like a ritual where you are transported to a mysterious room in order to find the thumb of a dead girl. In the room there will be a candle that you can blow out to escape the room. If you find the thumb of the girl then you will have a wish granted, however, if you are grabbed on the shoulder by the dead girl you must not turn around or you will be trapped in the room forever. While playing the game, one of the friends, Yumiko, disappears and her loverboy, of sorts, had vowed to find her if anything should go wrong. The cops simply think Yumiko ran away from home, but the kids think the game trapped her. In present day, the old friends meet back up in some kind of makeshift class reunion. Having grown distant, and trying to forget the incident, the group has moved forward except for loverboy, Takeshi, who still blames himself for not finding Yumiko. It doesn't help that he has stayed in close contact with Yumiko's mother who comes off as a bit unusual, though, I can't blame her. The movie implies the group plays the game one more time to humor Takeshi, but they don't actually show it. I also want to mention that the dork of the group, Chie, is pretty damn cute, played by Ayumi Ito. But perhaps more relevant to fangirls out there, one of the other characters, Tomohiko, is played by none other than L himself, Kenichi Matsuyama; he doesn't do much so don't get your hopes up.
Shortly after playing the game once more, Takeshi is attacked by a ghostly hand, minus a thumb, that throws him down a stairwell. At the same time, the douche of the group is killed with the thumb removed from his body. The police get involved and recall the group's association with the Yumiko disappearance, but I feel as though they didn't take the douche's murder very seriously; not sure what was up with that. A lot of shenanigans go on for a time, but I will clarify some things. The main way information about the urban legend has spread is through an anonymous person sending in notes to a radio show. Since they can't confirm that source, the group looks into the story themselves and uncover something about a girl named Saki. The film goes back and forth regarding what became of Saki, but this seems to be the source of most of the red herrings. Essentially, the real story of Saki was that, 30 years ago, she was a little girl going off the deep end and was talking to her thumb (okay, I didn't know that was a thing but sure). Her crazier dad cut off her thumb as a response and no one did anything about that for whatever reason. This led to the kids in town making fun of and bullying the poor girl. In a completely unrelated incident, and brushed over like hell, Saki's father suicided the two of them...somehow. Ah, I don't know! This led to the same kids that fucked with Saki to invent the "oyayubi sagashi" game where you look for the thumb and the mysterious room is her house (I think).
So another one of the friends is killed, seemingly by a ghost, as Chie slowly comes to the realization that maybe most of what they remember about their incident playing the game has become warped through the imagination of being a kid and the time in between. Chie has hazy memories of Yumiko quitting the game and talking to her about Yumiko's unspoken crush on Takeshi. In other words, she wasn't really trapped by a ghost and that perhaps something else happened. When Takeshi and Tomohiko go back to the place where they believe the game teleports you, the police get surveillance footage showing the identity of the anonymous person that has been contacting the radio show about the game. At over an hour into the film, with only the flimsiest of scares, you should easily predict that the anonymous person is, in fact, Takeshi. There is no ghost, the game was all in their imagination due to sketchy memories, and everything supernatural the audience has been seeing is in Takeshi's head. Takeshi would pretty much go into psychotic episodes triggered by his guilt of never finding Yumiko. I guess he was set off by Yumiko's mom moving away coupled with the reunion with people he was angry with, believing they gave up on their missing friend. Chie shows up to try and help them understand what really happened as she recalls that Yumiko had hid in an air vent and her body was probably still there. Takeshi goes apeshit and cuts off Tomohiko's thumb before trying to kill Chie. Chie manages to rip open the ventilation pipe and inside is, of course, Yumiko's dead body. Coming to terms with the fact that nothing he believes is actually real, and that he's killed people, Takeshi decides to take that beloved swan dive out a window. For some inexplicable reason, Chie decides she too wants to take the dive but Tomohiko stops her. The film then ends with Chie and Tomohiko making peace with their dead friends and kind of being happy. No final zinger or anything. Wow, I have to give them a little credit for that.
Eh, while I liked the abrupt and slightly unorthodox change to the genre--from horror to mystery-thriller--it felt shallow somehow. I guess I'm disappointed they had an interesting urban legend and threw it away carelessly. At the same time, a lot of the themes touched on, like memories, are not explored in depth when the potential was all there. And like I mentioned, there are a shit ton of red herrings in the plot making things overly complicated; keep in mind, the story does not come off as clearly as I wrote. Red herrings simply work better as characters because they are usually incorporated into the plot, but red herrings as plot devices go nowhere, waste time, and feel stupid unless a lot of effort is done to make the information feel relevant to the story; that was not the case in this instance. Despite this, I think there are enough good aspects to make this worth at least one viewing. The story is still cool and keeps you intrigued for a fair amount of the film, the acting is decent, and there appeared to be an effective use of a low budget. If you can find this somewhere on the fringes of the internet, give it a shot with an open mind.
Notable Moment: When Tomohiko mindlessly throws his weapon down just to get his thumb cut off. Yeah, not very L like that's for sure.
Final Rating: 5.5/10
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