STIGMATIZED PROPERTIES: POSSESSION (Japan, 2025) - REVIEW

Not one or two, but four scary properties in this massive sequel!

Yahiro wants to be a TV personality. Sick of his job at a foundry, he moves to Tokyo and immediately becomes a stigmatized property celebrity, where he films himself living in cursed apartments, which are then broadcast on television.

After he meets Karin, he continues to stay in scarier and scarier properties, until he moves into one place that hides a deep, dark secret that only he can solve.

2025 has been a solid year for the J-horror sequel: the second Kisaragi Station movie was fun, but perhaps not as good as the original, while the sequel to Sana was, in my opinion, heads and shoulders better than the first film.

But the first Stigmatized Properties movie was just ho-hum. Nothing great, but nothing terrible either. Directed by Hideo Nakata, the man behind the ever popular The Ring movies, it was something creatively different released at a time when the market was just starting to experiment with a whole host of new ideas, such as Takashi Shimizu’s Village of Terror trilogy.

The idea was solid though: lean into people’s voyeuristic tendencies (everyone has them, don’t even try and deny it) and mix it with something scary.

Now this film is not a sequel to the first movie. Instead, the movie borrows inspiration from a real-life person and adapts his experiences and stories into this film. It feels like every Indonesian horror movie released in the last 5 years, mixed with The Conjuring series.

But would you believe, in this scenario, that’s not a bad thing. In fact, it’s quite good. This movie is quite good, even if you can put up with the strange humour and the obvious nods that Nakata has thrown at his previous popular series. I don’t look forward to the day that I see this movie appear on a list of “Sadako Movies” just because it’s from the same director, features a girl in a white dress with long hair and also replicates the famous enlarged eye scene.

Okay, so with all that aside now, what about this film? Well, the first thing fans of the first movie should like is that we now get to visit four locations rather than just the one: a haunted apartment, a haunted Inn, a haunted share house and a fourth location that’s a bit of a spoiler but ties the whole film together.

What I liked about this film was the series of revelations that occurred throughout. This was made possible with the use of a character called Kamuro, a psychic-style woman who mentors Yahiro. This grounds the spookiness, of which there is a lot of, with explanation. Yes, they are real ghosts but we also get to find out why they exist and what their connection is to each property.

Except for the fourth location, that kind of makes no sense because technically it’s not a stigmatized property. In fact, you’ll find out at the end how it ties everything together, and while I am still not satisfied with the explanation the film gives, at least it’s a “feel good” ending for two characters who you will fall in love with during the film.

Is it perfect? It is most definitely not. The movie’s insistence on playing the sleight of hand card on the audience multiple times might leave you with some confusion about what the message of the film is. It’s charming that it tries to explain it, but the reality is that the order of how things occur make little sense, and blurring the lines between reality and ghost world shouldn’t have been dismissed as easily as it was.

Having said that, I really did like this film and I think you will too.

GENRE Horror
DIRECTOR Hideo Nakata
STARRING Shota Watanabe, Mei Hata, Kotaro Yoshida
ORIGINAL TITLE 事故物件ゾク 恐い間取り
ALTERNATIVE TITLE Stigmatized Properties: Possession, Stigmatized Properties: ZOKU – The Terrifying Floor Plan
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN Japan
RELEASE DATE 25 July 2025