Dave Boyle’s tightly-scripted riff on Japanese horror finds its deepest terrors not in ghosts, but the people who outlive them
In Never After Dark, Airi (Moeka Hoshi) makes a lucrative but lonely living as a medium exorcising the dead from properties for their new owners. With her ability to ritualistically slip into the spirit world and her deceased sister Miku (Kurumi Inagaki) as an afterlife assistant, hauntings now hold all the terror of a mundane work shift. A routine job at a renovating countryside mansion-turned-hotel seems no different–until the reality-bending mysteries held by its mouth-mangled central ghost (Mutsuo Yoshioka) reveal that the living are far more dangerous to Airi than the dead.
Dave Boyle’s chilling film thrives in the long shadow of Japanese horror–trafficking in the influential imagery and vibes of Ring and Ju-on, Boyle uses our familiarity as a solid foundation for a slickly-directed supernatural thriller full of surprising, emotionally resonant subversions. He quickly satisfies expectations before wildly exceeding them, eager to reach richer unexplored territory, namely inventive twists on how its central ghosts function, and the emotional ghosts such hauntings conjure. Boyle’s reverence for Japanese Horror tropes is matched only by his eagerness to upend them, making Never After Dark a mind-bending, deeply satisfying addition to the genre.
From the outset, Never After Dark is a universally sinister film whose stylized frames pay open homage to isolating chillers like The Changeling and The Shining as much as Japanese horror classics. For much of the first half, Airi navigates the cavernous hotel alone—shifting between reality and a half-lit, dread-laden afterlife to unearth the mansion’s truly terrifying spirits. Yet our medium remains remarkably unperturbed amid the patient, hard-hitting scares—epitomized in a bombastic sequence where she whirls through empty hallways with the gruesome Gaping Mouth Man as an unwitting dance partner. It’s a beautifully energetic scene, with a propulsive score that finds a liveliness amid the carefully curated dread.
Airi more than lives up to Boyle’s central gambit of creating a main character so used to the unexplainable that hauntings lose their lasting horror. Mirroring her audience’s own potential familiarity with horror tropes, she gives us permission to share in her unflappability—and makes it all the more effective when something finally does make her blood run cold. That relatability also greatly invests us in Airi’s bond with dead sister Miku, one that manages to be wittily professional and tenderly personal amid the paranormal. The nuanced character work by both Boyle and an excellent Hoshi become a vital bridge the gap between the film’s cool-headed horror and the genuine emotional terror beneath it.
The tension builds as Boyle and co-writer/cast member Kento Kaku root the film’s deepest dread in the living. Airi believes in spectral simplicity—single-minded souls with easily explained reasons for lingering in life; it’s the living who remain inscrutable, calculating, and malevolent. The arrival of the hotel’s remaining characters—cheery, ghost-obsessed hotelier Teiko (Tae Kimura) and her more skeptical son Gunji (Kaku)—lends uneasy credence to that worldview. So does the ghost-assisted discovery of a tin of bloody teeth, whose traumatic psychic flashes point to real-world violence well beyond the reach of any spirit (a stomach-churning editing centerpiece from cutter Chieko Suzaki).
While Kimura and Kaku bring welcome earnestness and hesitation to Teiko and Gunji, the back half belongs to Japanese cinema veteran Mutsuo Yoshioka—memorable for his work in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Chime and Cloud. He’s a Coenesque cipher, a late-arriving stranger whose joviality and menace are impossible to untangle. Boyle and Kaku keep us guessing what Yoshioka’s character—and everyone else—is truly capable of as the hotel’s secrets surface, revealing the slow-burn first half for what it always was: a long fuse for the audacious, explosive character zags to come.
It’s a tightly plotted script whose biggest surprises are rooted in character—while still leaving Boyle room for inventive twists on horror mechanics. The efficiency of his emotional and creative vision evokes the tragic, wry pacing of Nacho Vigalondo’s Timecrimes or fellow post-J-Horror film House of Sayuri, as subversions of genre and reality—even how ghosts fundamentally work—carry genuine emotional consequences.
Without spoiling where Never After Dark shines its light, it’s fascinating how Airi’s mundane approach to exorcism exposes an uncomfortable truth. The most painful moments of the dead—powerful enough to transcend death itself—are reduced to minor inconveniences for someone with the right skillset. Yet the living prove just as unable to move on from their own past deeds. Mirrors, central to Airi’s medium work, carry potent dual themes of self-reflection and deception, quietly asking each character what it would finally take to give up the ghost—and whether the living and the dead are as different as they seem.
Never After Dark had its World Premiere at SXSW 2026. The film opens in Japan in June 2026, and currently seeks international distribution.
