While self-explanatory, a director only gets to debut once, so they better make it count. A note that the popular Japanese comedian Yuriyan Retriever took in her stride with her first feature film, Mag Mag, which played at 2025’s Imagine Film Festival in Amsterdam (and Frightfest’s 2025 Halloween event, too). Not only is she making the leap from comedy to movies, like a millennial Takeshi Kitano, she has also directed a bold debut, with it playing like a 90s/00s “J-Horror” crossbred with the absurdist comedy streak of a Katsuhito Ishii (Funky Forest, & The Taste of Tea).
For the first hour it plays out like a typical Japanese turn of the millennium horror movie, we have high school age kids dying at the hands of the ghost-turned-curse, and a love-interest of one of the murdered parties, Sanae (a committed performance by Sara Minami) trying to solve the mystery. Well, that may be an embellishment, the first hour isn’t entirely played straight as the cold open climaxes with the titular curse literally scaring the piss out of a high school boy with his urine settling to form the title card – that aside, the first hour plays out with a certain tradition.
Around the hour mark, the movie claims it will return soon, at which point things jump to a group of “aspirational” twenty-somethings with a presentation that feels like a reality TV show. A sequence which Mag Mag turns up in, eventually, and then it jumps from haunting to haunting, only for Sanae to repeatedly turn up in an attempt to kill the ghost/curse. That’s right, she isn’t there to solve the mystery or merely survive, she is actively picking a fight with the intangible killer curse. And she isn’t so much of a friend as a full blooded stalker, evidenced by her having a massive art piece of one of the victims faces in her studio with a gooey mouth orifice that she climbs into. That being said, the love-rival aspect is dropped a little too too quickly for my liking. Nonetheless, no one could either accuse Retriever of resting on her laurels or failing to find ripe ground for parody.
The last thing you could ever accuse Mag Mag and its director, Yuriyan Retriever, of being is timid.
For more on Mag Mag, click on the poster at the bottom of the Page
The mark of a good parody isn’t just to take lazy potshots at genre tropes and trappings, but to work within those confines and find the comedy in the situations. Despite the formal slipperiness of Eisuke Naitô’s (Liverleaf & Yattaman) script, the mystery remains intact with a considerable twist regarding the titular curse, which keeps things agile rather than just using the mystery as a vehicle for the next punchline.
The final scene too considerably changes the direction of travel, taking it away from murderous ghosts and curses to something much more tangible, commenting on the pettiness of certain facets of Japanese (no spoilers) society. While that commentary is there in the final scene, it doesn’t turn the movie towards the “subtextual horror”, it’s just there if you chose to dig. The same is true for Mag Mag herself, the movie opens itself up as a commentary on body image ideals among younger generations in Japan. While textually dense, Naito and Retriever have conceived and delivered a movie too slippery to get stuck on one theme for too long.
From one moment to the next, Retriever shows promise and potential in her staging and blocking. You cannot undersell the fact that she turns a 2 meter tall woman in a dress with a head full of hair into a menace, using slow building quiet tension, dream logic invading reality, ghostly teleportations, the unaffected being unable to see Mag Mag even if she is right in front of them, and the pièce de résistance, the smacking of lips and proclamations of love before her victim has their eyes forcibly sucked from their heads. Like any horror movie, success depends on a defined bag of tricks and pushing/twisting them – the pathway to the finish-line here sees a child being put in harm’s way, and while some may see that as a cheap tactic to establish stakes, the twisting ensures it never stoops to cheap tricks or stunts (like the sort which gave ground for Ben Leonberg’s Good Boy (2025) to exist). All things considered, the best and worst you can say about Mag Mag is that it’s never predictable.
Of course, predictability is a double edged sword. Some will find the uniquely Japanese absurdity tiresome and try hard, and that wouldn’t be a wrong conclusion to draw – reviewing comedy is like trying to catch water in your hands. Likewise, others will find the comedy stylings amusing and endearing. Ultimately, whether you hate what it shoots for or love it, the last thing you could ever accuse Mag Mag and its director, Yuriyan Retriever, of being is timid. Like the saying goes, shoot for the moon and if you miss, you’ll still end up among the stars and that is a model more directorial debuts should strive for.
MAG MAG PLAYED AT THE IMAGINE FILM FESTIVAL 2025 IN AMSTERDAM
