The Horror of the Repeating Homeroom
If you’ve ever thought, “You know what would make high school worse? A supernatural death curse,” congratulations—you’ve just described Another, Takeshi Furusawa’s 2012 adaptation of Yukito Ayatsuji’s novel. It’s a film about teenagers dying in increasingly ridiculous ways, all while maintaining the emotional range of damp wallpaper.
It wants to be a haunting meditation on loss and the cruelty of fate. What it actually is: Final Destination: Homeroom Edition, directed by someone who just discovered fog machines and slow zooms.
By the end, you don’t fear the curse—you envy it for escaping the runtime.
The Plot: Because “Everyone Dies” Doesn’t Fill Ninety Minutes
The film begins in 1998, where our main character, Koichi Sakakibara (Kento Yamazaki, looking perpetually confused, which is fair), is recovering in a hospital from pneumothorax—because apparently, having collapsed lungs wasn’t tragic enough. He spots a mysterious girl with an eyepatch heading to the basement (as one does in horror movies), and like any teenage protagonist with zero survival instincts, he follows her.
Soon he transfers to a new school, Yomiyama North, home of Class 3-3—the most cursed group of adolescents this side of a CW pilot. The class behaves oddly: they’re quiet, they stare a lot, and they treat one student, Mei Misaki (Ai Hashimoto, looking like Wednesday Addams on antidepressants), as if she doesn’t exist.
Naturally, Koichi decides to befriend her, because teenage boys never met a creepy mystery they couldn’t turn into a bonding experience. What follows is an elaborate death spree where students perish in ways that make you question both the curse and the school’s safety record.
Umbrella impalement? Check. Glass through the skull? Of course. Spontaneous combustion of plot coherence? Constant.
The Curse Explained: Bad Luck, Worse Logic
As Koichi and Mei play Scooby-Doo in uniforms, they learn the truth: 26 years ago, a student named Misaki died, but his classmates were so in denial that they acted like he was still alive. The universe, apparently offended by their lack of boundaries, decided to punish them by resurrecting one dead person each year—someone no one realizes is dead—and then killing everyone else for fun.
The only workaround is to pick one student each year to be “ignored” by everyone—because ignoring your classmates always solves problems. Unfortunately, Koichi ruins this delicate balance by talking to Mei. Cue the death montage.
It’s an interesting premise… on paper. On screen, it’s like watching a ghost story written by someone with a head injury and a fetish for bureaucracy. Every ten minutes, someone explains the curse again, each time with more confusion. There are so many rules, you’d think this was a tax code, not a haunting.
And just when you think you’ve got it—boom, someone dies from a flying piece of furniture.
The Death Scenes: More Slapstick Than Scary
Another tries to make death terrifying, but ends up making it look like an over-the-top safety PSA. Every kill feels like an accident in a particularly cursed IKEA.
One girl trips and falls onto her own umbrella, impaling her throat—a moment that should be horrifying but lands somewhere between Looney Tunes and Final Destination 5. Another character gets annihilated by falling glass in what feels like an ad for reinforced windows. By the end, you start anticipating deaths the way you’d wait for punchlines.
You don’t scream—you keep score.
There’s an especially chaotic climax during the school trip where the students finally figure out they can end the curse by killing the “extra person.” Naturally, they respond with mass hysteria, paranoia, and setting the entire hotel on fire. Nothing says “problem-solving” like mass arson and adolescent murder.
It’s basically Lord of the Flies meets Scooby-Doo, except everyone’s a suspect and no one’s competent.
The Characters: Moody, Mysterious, and Mostly Wooden
Koichi is your standard horror protagonist—well-meaning, bland, and perpetually shocked that things keep going wrong. His defining trait is confusion. He spends half the movie looking like someone just told him ghosts pay taxes.
Mei Misaki, the eyepatch girl, is supposed to be enigmatic, but she’s really just sleepy. She delivers her lines with the energy of someone who’s been awake for 72 hours straight. Her big secret—that she has a magic glass eye that can see who’s dead—lands with the dramatic impact of a dropped sandwich.
The rest of the class exists solely to die, panic, or stare ominously into the distance. Even the adults are useless. There’s a homeroom teacher who might as well wear a sign saying, “I’m next,” and an aunt (Ai Kato) who’s so suspiciously calm you know she’s either possessed, dead, or both. Spoiler: she’s the extra dead person.
Direction: Fog Machines and Misery
Director Takeshi Furusawa clearly watched a lot of J-horror classics—The Ring, Ju-on, Dark Water—and decided to recreate them using only gray lighting, ominous whispering, and enough mist to cause a lung condition. Every shot looks like it’s filmed inside a refrigerator.
The pacing lurches between “molasses” and “meltdown.” The first hour drags like an overlong orientation video, then the final thirty minutes turn into an editing blender of fire, screaming, and unearned revelations.
If the movie had any sense of rhythm, it buried it alongside its characters.
Atmosphere: School Spirit, Minus the Spirit
To its credit, Another nails the oppressive mood of Japanese ghost stories—dim corridors, empty classrooms, and a sense of dread hanging in the air like mildew. But atmosphere alone can’t carry two hours of confused storytelling. It’s like sitting in a foggy gymnasium watching people read exposition cue cards.
You keep waiting for something meaningful to happen, but the movie is too busy explaining the curse for the eighth time. By the time it finally gets around to the fire-and-murder finale, you’re rooting for the curse out of sheer boredom.
The Ending: A Lesson in Overkill
After a dozen deaths and several lectures on supernatural bureaucracy, Mei discovers that Koichi’s aunt Reiko is the extra corpse. Instead of, you know, pulling her aside for a calm conversation, chaos erupts. Students attack each other, people burn alive, and the school trip turns into a supernatural mosh pit.
Reiko nobly sacrifices herself, ending the curse—for now. The survivors record a message for future students, which is adorable considering everyone in this town will inevitably forget it. It’s like leaving a safety manual in a fire.
Koichi leaves town, presumably to find a school where the biggest problem is cafeteria food.
Final Thoughts: “Another”? No Thanks.
Another wants to be a chilling exploration of grief, memory, and fate. Instead, it’s a convoluted soap opera where every character looks like they’re trapped in a group project gone wrong.
The deaths are absurd, the pacing uneven, and the acting flatter than the ECG of the entire cast. Even the title feels ironic—because this movie doesn’t need another anything. It needs a priest, an editor, and maybe a sense of humor.
You’ll walk away not scared, but exhausted—haunted not by ghosts, but by the memory of 110 wasted minutes.
Verdict: ★★☆☆☆
Another is a film where horror dies of natural causes. It’s gloomy, overexplained, and unintentionally hilarious—a supernatural mystery that proves sometimes the scariest thing about a curse is the script itself.
