One of my main critisisms with J-horror is that it tends to sacrifice a coherent story for the highly an unsettling atmosphere that the genre is known for. It can be nerve-wrecking when you're watching it, but downright confusing when trying to piece together an explanation of the events that took place. With that in mind, I have to give "Noroi: The Curse" credit where credit is due: while the backstory may be a convoluted mess of sacrifices and rituals, the way film is directed in a way that never tries to lose the audience. The documentary style of the film (something I haven't seen too much from J-horror) is fairly linear in its presentation and does a fair job at explaining the film's unraveling and increasingly complicated plot. There are many characters involved in the film's narrative, and if the audience was left trying to formulate the backstory and figure out what happened after all was said and done, it would have been a very frustrating experience. Fortunately the film ends with a particularly chilling scene that ties everything together. The strong ending, along with great use of sound throughout the film and a tactful decision to stay away from jump-scares, saves "Noroi" from being just another alienating horror flick from overseas. That being said, however, the film does have quite a few noticeable flaws. I found the pacing to be awfully slow, which can be detrimental for a 2-hour movie such as this one. It seemed the camera held on characters for dramatic effect far too often, and there was a lot of buildup to scenes that just weren't that chilling in payoff, either due to poor special effects or predictable outcomes. Furthermore, since everything was explained at the end, the ongoing mystery dragged on throughout the entire film and it became easy to get bored or lost when there were too many questions being asked with not enough answers being provided. In conclusion, while "Noroi: The Curse" can be slow in nature, it also consists of scenes that are truly scary, a ghost story that actually makes sense, and moments where the special effects complement the horrifying tone perfectly. If you're willing to stick around through the mostly uninteresting characters and moments of poor special effects, you'll find a particularly strong ending and cleverly executed scares in a found-footage J-Horror that I'd recommend over the majority of the Paranormal Activity films any day.
