The Bridge Curse: Ritual review.
The next chapter in surprise multi-media franchise The Bridge Curse uses every trick in the book to (mostly) diminishing returns.
New movie reviews will not contain spoilers.
The Bridge Curse: Ritual
Directed by Lester Hsi
Screenplay by Shih-yuan Lu
Starring Wang Yu-xuan, JC Lin, Patrick Shih, Shawn Hu, Tzu Hsuan Chan, Ning Chang, Summer Meng and Vera Yen
The Bridge Curse: Ritual Review
The order of events that transpired for me between the release of The Bridge Curse: Ritual on Netflix and sitting down for this review were strange. Of course, Netflix, itself, is part of the problem. They love sneaking foreign horror onto their service without warning. I’m sure it was in the fine print of a press release somewhere…likely listed under a catalog title with last year stamped across it. That date would be true, at least, in a technical sense. The movie was released in Taiwan last October. This is its debut in North America, however…which could have benefited from some marketing. Drop a trailer on your YouTube channel.
Anyway…that only covers the accidental discovery of Ritual’s existence. Upon seeing the title, “The Bridge Curse” my mind immediately went to the only logical place it could. Is this a video game adaptation? I haven’t played the game (subtitled Road to Salvation). It was released on consoles last August. Further down the rabbit hole I discovered that this game was an adaptation of a 2020 film simply titled “The Bridge Curse”. That movie is also streaming on Netflix…likely arriving on the platform with little fanfare itself. Obviously, I have not seen the original movie. What I have seen, however, is that the video game is getting a sequel this fall. There’s an entire, ever expanding, multimedia franchise about a haunted bridge out there, folks.
Today we’re only concerned with The Bridge Curse: Ritual. Having no familiarity with the original movie or video game adaptation…I’m not going to be able to tell you much about how this chapter connects to everything else. I know that it does intersect with the original film…to what degree…I have no way of knowing. Well…there’s one way but I thought it would be better to write this review from the perspective of someone walking in blind. Judging this film on its own merits rather than weighing it against expectations. It made me interested enough to give the original a watch and possibly give the game(s) a look…so that’s something. The good news for blind watchers is that Ritual is not overwhelmed by franchise lore you must know going in.
The Bridge Curse: Ritual tells a (mostly) self-contained story whose man characters and plotline are (mostly) exclusive to this chapter. I say mostly because it does connect to events in the first film in a major way. You just don’t need to know that to enjoy what Ritual is doing. Strangely, it isn’t the original film that gets in the way of Ritual’s success. The video game does. At least, the idea of the video game. A video game set inside the world of The Bridge Curse is, believe it or not, the central idea of this movie. It shouldn’t be. But it is.
Let’s back up. Ting (Wang Yu-xuan) is trying to finish the video game her brother Kai (Patrick Shih) was developing before he slipped into a coma. We see how this came to be in the opening scene of Ritual. It’s all about a curse, of course. Kai was riding a haunted elevator and was grabbed by something unseen. He never woke up. Ting enlists her friends to help finish the game. This involves walking around a haunted campus looking through a phone at every ghostly effect the programmers could think of. A cursory look at the video game implies this is its concept as well.
It’s fine. The concept and the movie itself. Sometimes the scares are effective…after a while none of them are. It has an air of throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks. The problem with this method is that there is a genuinely interesting plot happening underneath all the effects and thinly veiled advertising. Ting isn’t simply trying to finish the game. She’s looking for her brother’s spirit. The investigative parts of The Bridge Curse: Ritual are its strongest moments. When it becomes a full-on rescue mission, the movie justifies itself as a stand-alone story. Unfortunately, getting there involves playing a lot of the game. Not…the real-life game. The game Kai was testing. Yeah…I know.
The concept of the in-movie game is decent. I can’t imagine the real-life Ren building would be thrilled with it…but it does look fun. Basically, you walk around the supposedly haunted grounds while your phone shows you the spirits you need to defeat. We see a few of the minigames the finished product would contain. A few extended scenes in the movie are basically watching Ting play the game. I could see that being scary if you were allowed to wander around alone at night. The movie…not so scary. The game in the real world…to be determined.
The further it gets away from the game aspect…the better The Bridge Curse: Ritual is. Ting believes Kai is trapped in the spirit world inside of the building. She sets out, with the aid of a character who connects to the first film, to find him. Occasionally, the movie will give us a brief flashback to Ting and Kai as children…building a depth that only runs to the surface level. It helps the ending payoff a bit more emotionally…but feels like someone realized late in the going that they filled their movie with mini games instead of emotional depth. Flip those things around…you probably end up with a hell of a movie.
There are enough cool moments late in The Bridge Curse: Ritual to recommend watching it. Whether you’ve seen or played anything in its world before. It answers some questions you never thought to ask…tying together things we’ve seen with actions we weren’t aware were happening. Strong ideas like this, and an unearned emotional climax that almost works in spite of itself, hint at a far better movie than adaptation of a game adaptation of a movie we got instead.
Scare Value
The Bridge Curse: Ritual blurs the line between its film and video game series. The characters in this movie are working on a video game set inside the same universe of the video game already set inside the universe. If that sounds meta to you…it surprisingly is not. Instead, Ritual is a largely by the numbers haunted house story. A stronger focus on the emotional stakes instead of pushing video game modes would have helped.
2.5/5
The Bridge Curse: Ritual Link
Streaming on Netflix
