Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter This Temple
There are bad horror movies. Then there are movies like Temple (2017), which redefine badness as a kind of metaphysical state — not just a film you watch, but a slow spiritual death you experience. Directed by cinematographer-turned-director Michael Barrett (in his first and, mercifully, only attempt at directing so far), Temple is what happens when a travel brochure, a college thesis on Japanese folklore, and a tourism safety warning all collide and explode into 78 minutes of supernatural nonsense.
To call it “horror” is generous. To call it “a film” is debatable. It’s like someone tried to make The Grudge but forgot the plot, the scares, and the reason for existing.
The Plot: Americans Abroad, Acting Suspiciously Like Idiots
The movie opens with a bandaged man in a Japanese hospital being interrogated by a professor and his translator. He’s traumatized, uncooperative, and covered in gauze — the perfect visual metaphor for how this movie treats its own coherence: completely wrapped up and suffocating.
Flashback to the setup: Kate (Natalia Warner), a grad student studying comparative religion, convinces her boyfriend James (Brandon Tyler Sklenar) and her emotionally fragile friend Chris (Logan Huffman) to join her in Japan. Chris is still mourning his dead brother, James is still wondering why he agreed to this trip, and Kate is still pretending this script makes sense.
They do some sightseeing, eat sushi, and stumble across a mysterious folklore book that features a creepy temple. Naturally, they decide to go there, because horror movie law dictates that white tourists must ignore every local warning and walk directly into danger while holding a camera.
Soon enough, they meet Seita, a small Japanese boy who’s either a supernatural messenger or just really bad at child labor laws. He offers to take them to the temple that’s “forbidden” — always a good sign — and they say yes, because apparently, they’ve never seen a movie before.
Once there, things get spooky in the least imaginative way possible. There’s a kitsune statue, some whispering ghosts, and enough staring into the woods to fill a lumberjack’s calendar. Chris breaks his leg, James turns into a jealous idiot, and Kate discovers that the temple is haunted by — wait for it — dead children. Because if you’re going to make a generic horror film, you might as well go all in on clichés.
The movie limps toward a finale that involves flashbacks, bad CGI, and a final twist so limp it might actually be a public service announcement against cultural appropriation.
Characters: Dumb, Dumber, and the Guy in Bandages
The characters in Temple make the cast of Scooby-Doo look like trained FBI agents. Kate, our supposed scholar of world religion, has the academic curiosity of a toddler poking at a hornet’s nest. She’s fascinated by the haunted temple but apparently skipped the part of her syllabus about “Don’t trespass in cursed places after dark.”
Her boyfriend James is a walking red flag — jealous, petty, and allergic to basic human decency. When he’s not sulking about Kate’s friendship with Chris, he’s trying to prove his masculinity by wandering off into an abandoned mine. It’s as if the film decided to punish toxic masculinity by turning it into a literal corpse.
And then there’s Chris, our wounded everyman, who spends most of the movie looking like he’s trying to remember if he left the stove on. His emotional depth begins and ends with “dead brother trauma,” and when he’s not hobbling through the forest, he’s staring blankly at the supernatural like a man waiting for a bus that never comes.
Seita, the creepy child guide, might have been interesting — if he didn’t act like every other generic horror kid who speaks in riddles and vanishes conveniently whenever the budget runs low.
By the end, when Chris is revealed to be the “bandaged man,” you almost feel sorry for him — not because of his injuries, but because he had to stay in this movie longer than anyone else.
Tone: Lost in Translation, and Possibly in Editing
Temple wants to be atmospheric. It wants to be eerie. What it is, however, is duller than a butter knife in a monastery. Every scene is coated in fog — literal fog, because apparently that’s how you signal “mystery” when your cinematographer is also the director. The problem? Atmosphere doesn’t matter if nothing happens inside it.
The pacing is so slow you could leave the room, microwave a burrito, and return to find the characters still arguing about whether to go into the temple. The dialogue sounds like it was written by a machine learning model trained on tourism pamphlets and fortune cookies. Lines like, “Do you think it’s haunted?” and “We shouldn’t be here,” appear so frequently they could be used as a drinking game — though alcohol may be the only way to survive this experience.
The film also tries to build tension through jump scares, but they’re so predictable you could set your watch by them. Shadowy figure? Check. Sudden noise? Check. Slightly ajar door? Double check. The scariest part of the movie is realizing there’s still half an hour left.
Visuals: Postcard Horror
As a cinematographer, Michael Barrett knows how to make things look nice. Japan’s mountains, temples, and forests are gorgeous — so much so that the movie occasionally forgets it’s supposed to be terrifying and instead turns into a travel ad for rural tourism. You half expect a narrator to cut in and say, “Visit beautiful Japan — home of ancient temples, mysterious legends, and confused Americans who die for no reason!”
But even the prettiest shots can’t hide the film’s complete lack of vision. The camera lingers on statues, mist, and faces for so long it feels like the movie’s trying to hypnotize you into caring. The ghosts, when they finally appear, look like outtakes from a SyFy Channel original. The makeup department’s crowning achievement is “bandages.”
Themes: Spiritual Tourism and the Gospel of Poor Choices
If Temple were trying to say something — anything — about faith, guilt, or cross-cultural misunderstanding, that message got eaten by the editing bay. The film gestures vaguely at Japanese spirituality, folklore, and Western arrogance but never commits. It’s as if someone read half a Wikipedia article on Shintoism and decided, “Yeah, that’ll do.”
The result is a movie that feels accidentally condescending. The Japanese villagers are portrayed as ominous, secretive stereotypes straight out of The Wicker Man, while the Americans stumble around like exchange students lost on a field trip. If this was supposed to be a cautionary tale about respecting foreign cultures, it accidentally became a cautionary tale about respecting your audience’s intelligence.
Performances: Acting in a Vacuum
Logan Huffman gives the best performance in the film — though that’s like saying he’s the least disappointing item in a vending machine. He at least looks genuinely distressed, which may just be his reaction to the script.
Natalia Warner’s Kate has the emotional range of an abandoned mannequin, while Brandon Tyler Sklenar’s James delivers every line with the subtlety of a car alarm. The Japanese cast does their best, but since the movie treats them like background props, their efforts feel wasted.
The Ending: Bandages, Betrayal, and “Wait, That’s It?”
The climax involves Chris being attacked by ghost children (yes, ghost children) while Kate finds James eyeless in a mine. Cut back to the present: Chris, now bandaged, is being blamed for the murders. He screams about Seita — who may or may not be real — before stabbing someone with a pen and escaping.
That’s it. Roll credits. No resolution, no closure, not even a satisfying death scene. It’s like watching someone forget to finish their homework and still turn it in.
Final Thoughts: Abandon All Hope, and Maybe Filmmaking
Temple is a cinematic black hole — a place where good intentions, interesting ideas, and common sense go to die. It’s beautifully shot but completely hollow, like an art film made by ghosts who failed film school.
There’s no real horror, no real suspense, and certainly no reason to watch it unless you’re conducting research on how notto make your directorial debut.
If you’re looking for a chilling exploration of Japanese mythology, watch Kwaidan. If you want dumb American tourists dying horribly, watch The Grudge. But if you want to experience existential boredom wrapped in nice cinematography, Temple is your spiritual home.
Final Rating: ★☆☆☆☆
(One out of five haunted temples — the only thing cursed here is the script.)
