If you’ve ever wanted to watch 100 minutes of people looking mildly distressed in Airbnbs and desolate fields while absolutely nothing is explained, The Cursed Sanctuary X has you covered. It’s like someone adapted a stage play, set it in South Korea, removed the story, and left only vibes, awkward silences, and a shaman with better screen presence than the leads.
On paper, this sounds promising: Japanese horror plus Korean setting, cursed land, a shamanic ritual, siblings stumbling into something terrible. In reality, it feels like getting lost in Google Maps Street View with ambient anxiety playing in the background.
Plot? Technically, Yes. Emotionally, No.
We follow siblings Teruo Yamada (Masaki Okada) and Kaname Azuda (Haruna Kawaguchi), who head to South Korea and unknowingly set foot on cursed land. You’d think “cursed land” suggests stakes: apparitions, escalating danger, strange rules, maybe a coherent mythos.
What we actually get is:
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They arrive.
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Weird things… kind of happen.
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They meet a handful of characters who all seem like they’re in slightly different movies.
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They stare at things a lot.
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Occasionally someone mentions “this place” in a meaningful tone, as if that’s enough.
The curse itself is less a specific horror device and more a catch-all excuse for:
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People acting off
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Reality feeling slightly skewed
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The audience slowly realizing they care more about what they’re having for dinner than what happens to anyone on screen
There are moments where something almost lands—a strange sound, a disorienting cut, a ritual that feels genuinely uncanny—but because nothing is anchored, it all floats away. It’s “otherworldly,” sure, in the sense that it never manages to feel like it exists in any world where cause and effect are things.
Anxiety Cinema, But Without the Payoff
Director Yu Irie has said he wanted to focus less on fright and more on inducing “anxiety” in the viewer, leaving much up to interpretation and stripping the film of any “moral” or “message.”
Mission absolutely accomplished on the first two points:
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You do feel anxious—mostly about whether the film is going somewhere.
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There is indeed a lot left up to interpretation—mainly “What is happening?” and “Why is that happening?” and “Is this going to be explained?”
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There is no moral or message—unless you count “Don’t walk onto random property in foreign countries” or “Never follow your sibling anywhere.”
The problem is, anxiety without release, escalation, or insight just becomes irritation. You can’t build a horror film entirely on a persistent “uneasy” feeling and then refuse to cash it out in any meaningful way. It’s like being stuck in the buildup of a jump scare that never arrives, for an entire feature film.
Characters: Siblings and Strangers, All Underwritten
Teruo and Kaname are the emotional core, in theory. In practice, they’re delivery systems for confusion.
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Teruo: the kind of guy who looks perennially tired and confused, which, to be fair, is appropriate here.
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Kaname: equally lost, occasionally alarmed, mostly reactive.
They’re not badly acted, just barely written. We get almost no real sense of who they are beyond “related” and “in trouble.” Their dynamic is so lightly sketched that when bad things loom, it doesn’t feel tragic so much as mildly inconvenient.
The supporting cast is a buffet of underused talent:
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Kiyoshi (Kiyohiko Shibukawa) and Kyoko (Maho Yamada) drift in with the air of people who know something profound, then mostly… don’t share it.
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Hoshino (Yōko Maki), Egushi (Naoto Ogata), and the others feel like NPCs in a cursed walking simulator—there, present, but not particularly alive in a narrative sense.
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The wizard/shaman (Jin Tae-hyun) is easily the most striking presence, and the exorcism scene could’ve been the centerpiece of a much better movie. Instead, it plays like a brief guest appearance from a different, more interesting horror film that got spliced in by accident.
No one really grows, no one reveals anything rich, and no relationships feel like they transform under the pressure of the curse. People just sort of exist, suffer gently, and move the runtime forward.
The “Otherworldly” Atmosphere: Dreamlike or Just Directionless?
Irie has said he wanted a more “otherworldly” feel, and sure, the film nails that in a very literal way: it seldom feels connected to anything concrete.
The move to South Korea and filming in Incheon is visually smart—vacation homes, old towns, liminal spaces. You get plenty of shots of roads, houses, and landscapes that feel just off enough to be unsettling. There’s an interesting cultural layering too: Japanese characters moving through Korean architecture and rituals. But the film never really uses that cultural tension in any meaningful way. It’s flavor, not substance.
The dreamlike approach would work better if there were sharper spikes of terror or emotional revelation. Instead, the pacing is flat:
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Strange event
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Long lull
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Another strange event
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Long, slightly talky lull
It’s like a horror ASMR channel accidentally set to “mild discomfort” instead of “nightmare fuel.”
Horror Without “Know-How”
Irie has openly admitted he avoided horror for years because he felt he lacked the “know-how” and respected the directors who defined the genre. That honesty is admirable. Unfortunately, this film sometimes feels like confirmation rather than contradiction of that worry.
Classic J-horror and K-horror succeed not just on mood, but on:
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Strong central images or concepts (the cursed videotape, the long-haired ghost, the specific rules)
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Emotional core (grief, guilt, rage)
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Clear, if elliptical, sense of what the haunting is about
The Cursed Sanctuary X flirts with these elements—cursed land, shamanism, displacement, cultural unease—but never commits. It’s the horror equivalent of someone mumbling an incredibly spooky story in another room; you catch fragments, but nothing lands.
There are hints of themes—foreignness, intrusion, the violence of history—but the film refuses to frame them. “No moral or message” quickly stops feeling bold and starts feeling like an excuse for “we didn’t know what we wanted to say.”
The Stage Play Roots: You Can Still See the Nails
Being adapted from a play, Holy Ground X, shows in both good and bad ways:
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Good: some scenes feel intriguingly theatrical—staged confrontations, odd blocking, a sense of characters “performing” in spaces that feel intentionally artificial.
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Bad: whole chunks feel talky, static, and trapped in rooms, even when the camera could be doing more.
Irie cites chelfitsch theatre and even put actors through contemporary dance classes. You can occasionally see that in how people move—slightly stylized, off-kilter, like their bodies are out of sync with their environment.
This could’ve been incredible if it were tied into the horror concept—people literally moved by the curse, distorted by the land. But instead of amplifying the uncanny, it often just reads as self-conscious: people moving weirdly in a film that isn’t confident enough to lean into that weirdness.
The Exorcism Scene: A Glimpse of the Film That Could’ve Been
The standout sequence is the shamanistic exorcism ritual. Irie interviewed mudangs and threads some real Korean shamanistic flavor into the film. For a few minutes:
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The energy spikes
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The soundscape gets intense
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The blocking and movement feel meaningful
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The anxiety has an actual focal point
You think, “Ah, here we go. Now the film is about to become something.” Then it just… doesn’t. The ritual ends, the curse continues, and the film slides right back into its comfy, indistinct haze.
It’s the cinematic equivalent of someone finally raising their voice in a monotone monologue, only to clear their throat and go back to mumbling.
Final Verdict: Cursed By Its Own Restraint
The Cursed Sanctuary X feels like what happens when a talented director is so determined not to be blunt, simple, or didactic that he forgets to be compelling.
You get:
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Atmosphere without payoff
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Anxiety without catharsis
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Characters without arcs
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Lore without clarity
It aims to leave things “up to the audience,” but that only works if you give the audience enough to work with. Here, you’re mostly left piecing together mood fragments and wishing the curse at least had the decency to come with a handbook.
If you’re into extremely slow-burn, ambiguous, “nothing is explained and also no one owns a personality” horror, this might work as background while you do something else.
Otherwise, you may find yourself experiencing the most meta horror of all: realizing halfway through that you, too, have stumbled onto cursed land—specifically, the cinematic kind where pressing play means you’re not allowed to get your time back.
