FFFA 2026 Film Review - About a Place in the Kinki Region
Images courtesy of Fantastic Film Festival Australia.
About a Place in the Kinki Region, or simply KINKI, is the latest from indie J-Horror icon Kōji Shiraishi, whose 2005 film Noroi: The Curse endures as a crowning achievement in the found footage horror genre. Two decades and a lot more found footage later, Shiraishi returns with this global release to remind us that he is still a master of the artform.
An occult magazine editor has gone missing along with the article he was working on, leaving his colleagues to wade through a mass of research material in the office basement. Partly to locate their colleague, and partly to finish his article in time for print, they begin to sift through the mountain of seemingly unconnected home videos, vlogs, old newsreels, and other found media. Slowly but surely, the same images and events start showing up across decades of footage: a decrepit shrine in the mountains, deep, far-off voices in the woods, and ghostly figures haunting dark streets—all circling a certain place in the Kinki Region. The worst part: everyone who has tried to connect the dots has since disappeared.
The film is an adaptation of the book by the pseudonymous Sesuji, which began as an intermittent web-novel in 2023. The novel consists of almost two dozen short stories presented in different ‘found’ formats like forum threads, blog posts, and YouTube video transcripts; adapting it into a found footage horror film was a no-brainer.
Interestingly for the genre, KINKI isn’t strictly presented as found-footage. The film dances between conventionally-shot scenes which show the characters in their investigation, and the lo-fi found-footage ‘segments’ they are watching. The real-life scenes are beautifully shot, with reserved movement and popping colours, making a perfect visual juxtaposition to the segments which recreate old digital-video formats immaculately, full of digital artefacts, washed-out colours, and over-the-top, to-camera performances from the myriad of supernatural victims.
The found footage segments don’t offer much new for the genre, but the sheer volume of them, their brief runtimes, and overall quality make the film an easy and highly enjoyable watch. Common complaints of the genre include the overuse of shaky-cam, artificial ‘glitches’, and sudden jumpscares with little buildup. For the most part, the veteran Shiraishi eschews these cliches and instead utilises his budget impressively to deliver long, drawn-out moments of lingering horror which elicit hopelessness over anything; as a ghostly figure stands at the window, the audience is not waiting for a jumpscare but watching a sealed fate unfold with painful tension.
For a director who helped to define the genre, it’s no surprise that Shiraishi’s new effort is very self-aware. KINKI presents as dead serious but it is full of laugh-out-loud moments. One example has the main characters watching a ‘Watch This and Die video’, then realising in a panic what type of video it is, a tongue-in-cheek reference to J-horror icon Ringu (1998).
KINKI is a must-watch for fans of Japanese horror, featuring many of the genre’s hallmarks—local folklore, creepy kids, uncannily inhuman ghosts, and the violent clash of modern technology with primordial forces. Though J-Horror has a reputation for being incredibly disturbing and graphic, KINKI’s humour and brisk pace hold it back from being anything truly traumatic. Though that isn’t to say it doesn’t have its share of chilling moments, in between the fun.
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About a Place in the Kinki Region screened as part of the 2026 Fantastic Film Festival, whichran from the 23rd of April to the 15th of May. Check out the festival website for more info here.