After discovering his wife Kayako Takako Fuji has an affair with her college friend Shunsuke Kobayashi Yûrei Yanagi, illustrator Takeo Saeki [Makoto Ashikawa] commits a brutal act that shatters their home in Nerima. He murders Kayako, their son Toshio [Ryôta Koyama] Saeki, and the family cat Mar, before deserting the house. The anguish, rage, and sorrow wrapped around this murder ignite a dark force that blooms into a curse, turning the house’s inhabitants into Onryō, restless spirits hungry for vengeance. The curse does not stay contained; it seeps into the lives of anyone who steps into the house in Tokyo or even those who merely become connected to someone who has entered, seeping its poison into every death site it claims and pulling more victims into its growing fog of fear.
Kobayashi, Toshio’s elementary school teacher, begins to notice the boy’s unsettling absences from class and decides to approach the tainted residence. He visits the Saeki home, leaving his pregnant wife Manami Yue at home, hoping to understand what is happening. Inside, he stumbles upon the ruined past—Toshio’s quiet, frightened presence and Kayako’s room shrouded in a sense of unspoken longing. He learns of Kayako’s impossible love for him and eventually uncovers her bloodied corpse hidden away in the attic. The moment of truth spirals into panic as Kobayashi attempts a desperate escape with Toshio, but a cruel twist unfolds when he receives a call from Takeo, who has gone to his own apartment and forces a catastrophic act against Manami’s unborn child, killing her in the process. The shock leaves him paralyzed as Kayako’s corpse reawakens and finishes him off, her spectral presence a cold, merciless force.
Meanwhile, Takeo Saeki’s brutal act completes its cruel circle as Kayako’s vengeance reaches out beyond the living. Takeo himself is pulled into the same web of violence, carrying a gruesome burden in the street—the dead fetus—before Kayako finally ends his life with a merciless strike. The house’s malevolent energy then waits, patient and patient, for the next family to trespass.
Sometime after the carnage in Nerima, the Murakami family moves into the same haunted residence. The daughter Kanna Murakami [Asumi Miwa] shares the space with her tutor Yuki [Hitomi Miwa], a caretaker who helps with her schooling and the rabbits they are tasked to feed at school. Yuki, who harbors a phobia of cats, recoils when a black cat appears inside the house, and a sense of dread thickens as strange noises echo from the attic. When Yuki investigates, she encounters the same dark force that has visited other occupants, and she is soon slain by Kayako in a chilling, unseen moment. The innocence of the day-to-day chores—school routines, lessons, feeding the rabbits—collides with an unyielding terror that refuses to be ignored.
Across town, Tsuyoshi Murakami [Kazushi Andō] heads to school to meet his girlfriend Mizuho Tamura [Chiaki Kuriyama], only to vanish before he can arrive, leaving Mizuho to wait in the teacher’s room while a routine school inspection intensifies the eerie mood. In a terrifying moment, she receives a dispatching call from a mysterious number that sounds like a taunt—the sequence “4444444444” echoes the Japanese word for death—followed by the sudden, terrifying appearance of Toshio. The boy’s spectral presence is a warning sign that the curse is not a rumor but a living, breathing force that seeks new victims.
The investigation deepens as Detective Yoshikawa [Denden] and his aide Kamio [Tarô Suwa] comb through a ghastly crime scene—the mutilated body of high schooler Hisayo Yoshida, one of the students who were supposed to feed the rabbits, lies nearby along with a human jaw, a shocking clue that hints at the brutality tethered to the Nerima house. Back at the Murakami residence, Noriko Murakami [Yumi Yoshiyuki] returns home to find her world unspooling. Her daughter Kanna enters the house in a terrifying state, presenting Noriko with a gruesome sight that reveals a jawless mouth—a stark, horrifying sign of the curse’s reach. Noriko’s scream cuts through the quiet as she confronts a home that has become something other than a place to rest.
As the chain of fear continues, the Nerima house is eventually sold by Suzuki Real Estate, owned by Tatsuya Suzuki [Makoto Ashikawa], who senses a growing, sinister electricity around the property. He calls his spiritually inclined sister, Kyoko Suzuki [Yuko Daike], to visit and assess the situation. Kyoko experiences acute discomfort upon entering and is unsettled after a brief encounter with Kayako. After a symbolic ritual—she drinks a gulp of sake, a superstition used to test a potential buyer—she cautions that those who spit out the drink should rethink the purchase. She bolts from the house, leaving her brother behind to face the district’s darkest energy. Not long after, the house changes hands again, this time to the Kitada couple. Kyoko’s warning lingers in the air, but the fate of those who cross the threshold is sealed: Yoshimi Kitada [Kaori Fujii] becomes possessed by Kayako, while the family’s life continues to spiral into a nightmare they cannot wake from.
In the end, what begins as a personal betrayal escalates into a city-wide haunting, a relentless cascade of death and possession that refuses to stop. The Nerima house stands as a somber monument to the consequences of anger, jealousy, and tragedy, a place where every visitor becomes a witness to the cruel history baked into its walls and where the living must decide how to live with a force that refuses to die.
