Director Takashi Shimizu’s latest, The Mouths, has a pretty straightforward premise: what if an enormous, threatening tree at the edge of a cemetery contained a killer curse? Touch it, make a wish, and let the horror begin.

As fans of Shimizu’s work know, it’s never quite so straightforward. The Japanese director, best known for the Ju-on films, delights in non-linear narratives and haunting specters. In this capacity, The Mouths more or less adheres to formula.

The screenplay was written by Masahiro Yamaura and adapts Sesuji’s novella A Questionnaire About the Mouth. The source material provides a framing device that opens the film before it is swiftly forgotten, only to return in the film’s closing moments in highly amusing fashion.

In between, the film tells the story of four friends who investigate an urban legend of a cursed tree, including soft-spoken Shota (Rihito Itagaki), sensitive Mirei (Momona Kasahara), outgoing Ann (Ai Yoshikawa), and her boastful boyfriend Tatsuya (Keito Tsuna).

Initially, the action seems straightforward: the four teens drive to the cemetery, discussing what Shota heard about the tree with a brief pause at a convenience store in between. Throughout all of these early scenes, the interaction among the teens hints at a complicated dynamic, including a minor spat between Ann and Tatsuya, and Shota’s brief but meaningful glance at Ann in the rearview mirror. These sequences are regularly interrupted by direct address police interviews as present-day Shota, Tatsuya, and Mirei make ominous declarations about the events of that evening.

The first act works because The Mouths is slowly building tension around what happened. It’s obvious from their statements that things will go awry, but Yamaura’s script teases things out. Even when they arrive at the cemetery, rather than proceed directly to the cursed object, the action pauses so Shota can propose a specific course of action: they will proceed to the tree, individually, in a specific order. The wait for the action to kick in is both tantalizing and agonizing.

First up: Shota, followed by Tatsuya, then Ann. Mirei, meanwhile, becomes increasingly reticent, which alarms the others who have already noted her sensitivity to otherworldly phenomena.

When Ann disappears, the film moves into a new act as the remaining members of the group search for her while seemingly being haunted by both her and the tree. This is where Shimizu’s penchant for ghostly figures lurking in the background and peeking around corners comes to the forefront, including one stand-out moment that leans into the curse’s origin: the visual of a hanged woman with a grotesquely stretched neck.

The middle stretch feels a little too familiar to the director’s work, however, so it’s exciting when the last act upends much of what we thought we knew. There is a reason that the film is called The Mouths: not only are most of these people revealed to be unreliable narrators, but it is revealed that several interactions throughout the film were manipulated by characters with malicious intent. These people are not quite what they seemed.

This revisionist filter on the events of the movie’s first half is provocative and enticing, though the creative team struggles to execute it without devolving into messy confusion. There’s at least one plot beat that should be a massive revelation, but both the visuals and the dialogue render it quite confusing, which robs the moment of some of its power. This is a shame, because the last act is what makes the film stand out from other curse/ghost movies.

The performances of the main four teens are solid, with Itagaki getting to show the most range. Many of the supporting characters, including a pair of frenemies who also become involved in the curse, as well as the detective investigating the case, feel a bit superfluous; the film would have benefitted from cutting back some of these scenes or, alternately, beefing up a few of these roles to justify their inclusion.

The Mouths’ other big element is its sound design. The area around the tree is surrounded by wet mud that slurps and sucks at shoes, while the cursed bark is covered in cicadas, whose distinctive buzz and crunchy shells provide evocative foley.

Overall, The Mouths is a solid but slightly inessential addition to Shimizu’s filmography. For the auteur’s fans, there’s plenty to appreciate, particularly the way the Japanese master sets up scares and pays them off, including good moments in a library and later when the detective is driving. On the other hand, the film’s big reveal is handled so clumsily that its potency is disappointingly muted.

The Mouths is a decent time, but it’s hard to overlook some of its weaknesses.

The Mouths made its North American premiere at the 2026 Fantasia International Film Festival. Release info TBD.