‘Dollhouse’ Review – Cursed Doll Movie Is Silly and Self-Aware [Fantasia 2025]

There’s just something about a cursed doll movie.

Japanese writer/director Shinobu Yaguchi’s entry in the sub genre, Dollhouse (2025), doesn’t reinvent the wheel so much as play around with the conventions and audience expectations. Yaguchi, who is best known for his comedies, manages to integrate funny moments into the film, which is mostly successful at balancing its diverse tones. If anything the infusion of comedy and the sly wink-wink, nudge-nudge moments are what help the film stand out from its contemporaries.

When Yoshie Suzuki (Masami Nagasawa) is left minding daughter Mei’s (Totoka Honda) pre-teen friends, she leaves the girls alone to quickly bike to the store for snacks. Not unlike a Final Destination film, the red flags immediately begin to pop up: there’s a strange man she spots walking down the street and other women are gossiping about whether he’s dangerous at the store. Even more significantly, Yoshie purposefully checked and removed all of the dangerous items around the house before she left. 

What the young mother doesn’t account for, though, is that the girls would play hide and seek and that all of the good/obvious spots would be taken…except for the washing machine.

Flash forward one year and Yoshie is still grieving the loss of her daughter. She’s a shell of herself and the house is full of reminders: we literally see Yoshie washing clothes by hand before the telltale vacancy where the washer once stood. Even that is not enough, though; Yoshie and her doctor husband Tadahiko (Kôji Seto) have begun packing up the house to move.  

It sees like fate, then, when Yoshie chases an advertisement for doll cremation into an antique street fair and stumbles upon a beautiful lifelike doll in a glass cage.

When she takes it home, dresses it up in Mei’s clothes and cuts its hair to suit, Tadahiko is taken aback, but the grief counsellor she’s been seeing encourages them both to embrace doll therapy (see also: the premise of M. Night Shyamalan-produced Apple TV series Servant).

Yaguchi gets good comedy mileage out of not only Tadahiko’s reaction to the doll, but also the way the house once again changes to reflect the changes in the family. As the doll becomes a surrogate daughter in Mei’s wake, the wall of family pictures switches to photos of the couple and the doll. 

Then another change: Yoshie finds herself pregnant with a new baby and suddenly the doll becomes relegated to the sidelines, tossed aside and buried in the back of the closet in favour of the real thing. A five year jump introduces child number two, a daughter named Mai (Aoi Ikemura). When the doll is rediscovered by the little girl, it is dusted off, given the name Anya and quickly becomes Mai’s most cherished possession…albeit one that she converses with and who occasionally hurts her and other girls.

The remainder of the first and second act detail the weird stuff that happens around Aya. With Yoshie “recovered” from her grief, Tadahiko is back at work at the hospital and barely present. For this portion of the film, Dollhouse turns into a women’s picture as the housewife struggles with her suspicions that the doll is alive while everyone else wonders if she’s going mad.

The supernatural stuff plays in familiar territory, with the doll appearing in unexpected places, seemingly running around of its own accord, and miraculously reappearing despite Yoshie’s best attempts to get rid of it. Not unlike Child’s Play/Chucky movies, Aya’s movements require a child actor standing in for the doll as it runs around in the foreground or background.

Thankfully both Tadahiko and his mother are brought into the believer’s fold after their own encounters with Aya, including one funny interaction at grandma’s house involving a closet and a robot cleaner, and another involving an act of violence on a bridge that is captured on CCTV. 

Once everyone is in agreement that the doll is cursed, the remainder of the film circles around how to dispose of it while also exploring its mythology. Much of this is funny and/or intriguing, but Yaguchi’s efforts to include a bit of everything does chip away at the pacing and draw the film out needlessly. 

A YouTube video featuring a group of overly excited young paranormal investigators called Occult Rangers is amusing, but only slightly relevant to the plot. A man with ulterior motives who offers to cremate the doll is amusing and subversive, but makes the arrival of a helpful priest, Kanda (Tetsushi Tanaka), feel repetitive. A lengthy island-set climax with multiple setbacks and “surprises” feels overly drawn out, particularly for a film with only one death (Mei’s) and a runtime just short of two hours. 

Despite this, Dollhouse is a fun slice of cursed object entertainment. The doll’s design is beautiful and creepy, and even if many of the movie’s set pieces aren’t scary, they’re staged in exciting ways. 

For audiences who enjoy their scary doll movies with a healthy dose of sly wit, silliness, and subversion, Dollhouse is worth playing with.

Dollhouse played at Fantasia International Film Festival.

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