This J-horror epic from director Kiyoshi Kurosawa has a Ring-style hook, but it broadens into a vision of the apocalypse. A variety of young folk around a campus chance upon “The Forbidden Room” on the internet, which seems to compel them to commit suicide (in a startling moment, one girl in the background of a long shot jumps off a tall building).
Investigators and victims vaguely hook up, though the point is that — like a computer program that generates randomly moving dots which are attracted to one another but ‘die’ if they get too close — these people are so isolated and socially inept that they don’t have a hope of coping with the haunting. Unsettling and puzzling rather than outright scary, this is as much a bizarro art film as a horror show.