Stigmatized Properties - Possession (2025)

Premise: Here comes the sequel to the previous review, which was about the first movie in the Stigmatized Properties series, Stigmatized Properties! The only connection to the first one is that it is also directed by Ringu’s Hideo Nakata and it stars a dude that wants to make it big as a comedian filming what happens if you live in a haunted house, basically! And… that’s that!

Under 90 minutes? Nope, once again it’s almost two hours.
Do they say the title? Well, no, they say “stigmatized properties” and “possession” separately a lot but not the title.

First thing I thought of: well, that was disappointing.
Okay, more: So, funny how things go sometimes. I actually liked the first movie because, let’s face it, it was dumb as a bag of bricks and it also knew how to be funny and not take itself too seriously. For some reason even though there’s still some funny moments, this one is a lot more… I don’t know, it’s trying to go for a bit of drama with the romance bit and then it forgets it should also tell some sort of coherent story on the spooky side. Which it really doesn’t, this time there’s barely any connection between the different properties and our dude just basically goes from place A to place B. Mind you, there are still some cool ideas here and there like the way they play with GPS location, but… unfortunately I didn’t enjoy this one even remotely as I liked the first.

A simple way to improve it: So the main character’s agent in the movie is played by this older man who seems like he’s always half smiling and sorta high. Anytime he’s on screen, the soundtrack suddenly becomes the Yakuza Substories theme music (i kid you not, it basically sounds like that) and it made me think about how easily all the problems in this movie could be solved by hitting some random dude/ghost with a bicycle.

Trivia about the IMDb trivia letterboxd user reviews:

Harsh, but fair.