A class at Tamaoka High School receive text messages telling them they must participate in a series of tests: at first seemingly innocuous things like a student confessing their love for another; or kissing another student. When students refuse to comply, they disappear mysteriously from the world, with only the remaining class members being able to recall their existence. Student Chiemi (Yurina Kumai) attempts to get to the bottom of the mystery as the tests become increasingly violent and classmates begin to disappear leaving few survivors.
Based on a popular mobile phone novel by Nobuaki Kanazawa and directed by Norio Tsuruta (“Premonition”), “Ousama Game” is a mild teen horror that is unlikely to shock fans of the genre. The film’s main problem is that the vanishing students, while inexplicable, is not particularly scary. The film is largely bloodless and the challenges early on are fairly tame. Things begin to get slightly more dangerous as the plot progresses, but the film could have offered more moral conundrums, or terrifying prospects for the protagonists to face. We learn little about any of the characters and instead spend the time waiting for a resolution that never arrives.
The central conceit of “Ousama Game” is an intriguing one, suggesting theological, political and sociological analogies. The presence of an omnipotent, capricious force, that tortures people for its own amusement provides a look at how religion brutalises believers through growing fear and paranoia, while dangling the possibility of an answer before them. However, it is this self-same absence of the possibility of reprieve that also removes from the film any sense of threat. When the realisation comes that there is nothing that can be done, it undermines any potential tension. Also, the rather awkward explanation and attempt at a twist fall flat as the person who is supposed to be suffering an interminable fate is oblivious to that fact, thereby making the entire enterprise pointless. A shaky premise that could have been rescued by some creative deaths or challenges sadly fails to capitalise on its limited potential.
