Jiro Nagae has established himself throughout the years as a mainstream horror-director. Notwithstanding his experimental outing FPS (2024), most of his oeuvre has neatly played within the well-established lines of the J-horror genre.

When Jiro Nagae encountered the game The Convenience store in an article in 2005, he was immediately intrigued. After playing Chilla’s Art indie game and watching others play the game, he realized the game resembled his approach to horror, blending a damp atmospheric stillness which is typical of Japanese horror with more Hollywoodian jump-scare elements (Simons, 2026). Yet, is Nagae, in the footsteps of Genki Kawamura and his Exit 8 (2025), able to deliver an effective adaptation of this beloved indie game?

Nagae throws the spectator into the narrative of The Convenience Store by being exposed to the brutal murder of Kenta and his mother Saeko and the sight of head with an eye gauged out. Suddenly, we find ourselves walking to a convenience story to take over from Funahashi (Tetta Seki) and begin our night-shift. Two cops, Shinji Surawatari (Terunosuke Takezai) and Kazuki Kondo (Shunsuke Tanaka) are suddenly driving towards a crime-scene, the destination the very same convenience store. Toshiro Tsurukawa, the manager of the convenience story – his eyes gauged out – has been murdered and Yukino Tazuru (Kotona Minami), who started her night-shift, discovered his body.    

The opening sequence of The Convenience Store seeks to introduce – or subject – the spectator to the narrative’s organizing riddle, to its orienting puzzle of what links the brutal murder by which the narrative opens with the disconcerting events that befall Yukino Tazuru. Jiro Nagae also takes the time to establish the space of the convenience store as a site where disconcerting Otherness continuously rears its head. The spectator is confronted with ominous statements (e.g. “The bridge you crossed is said to be a suicide spot”; “In my dream, I was asked to warn you all”; “I look forward to the day of judgement”) and strange encounters and happenings (e.g. Funahashi leaving the convenience store without changing his clothes, a part-timer being found unconscious in a locker in the changing room, the door-chime ringing without a soul nearby, … etc).  

The spectator will have no trouble to discern that The Convenience Story features a dynamic that is quite similar to narratives structured around an unappeased grudge (urami, noroi) or featuring a blood-thirsty onryo – e.g. Ringu (1998) and Ju-On: The Grudge (2002). We would even argue that Nagae’s film presents the logic of the bursting forth of disconcerting Otherness in a purified form: the Otherness complicates the mundane frame of repression not merely to attack the societal Other but also to force some kind of societal recognition.  

This framing allows the spectator to understand that the delivery of SD-cards and other disconcerting sights and signifiers are, first and foremost, appeals. They seek to upset the mundane experiential field of a subject in order to instrumentalize him in etching a repressed forgotten truth in the fabric of the symbolic, in the field of the societal Other. 

Yukino, however, remains quite oblivious to the appeal-function of these infractions of Otherness. Despite her mundane experimental field being continuously punctured and complicated, she keeps retreating into the pacifying bosom of her ego and the fictitious consistence of her societal surroundings. Sawatari, on the other hand, refuses the appeal made to him by relying on the law and objective reason. It is the passivity or the refusal shown towards this Otherness – these intrusive avatars of the real – that ultimately puts subjects’ life into danger. All who ignore the appeal, all who realize themselves as being complicit to the repressive nature of the Other, must pay the price (Narra-note 1).    

We must make the spectator attentive to the fact that we, with purpose, misrepresent the unfolding of the narrative, giving the keys to understand the narrative logic better without giving too much away, without sabotaging the spectator’s pleasure (Structure-note 1).  

The composition of The Convenience Store offers the spectator a combination of POV-sequences and more straight-forward compositions. The use of POV-shots enables Jiro Nagae to force the spectator out of his position of absent witness by putting him into the shoes of the main character; by letting the filmic frame coincide with the moving eye of the main character.

Nagae transforms these POV-shots into threatening ominous imagery, into subtle generators of anticipatory fear and uneasiness, by relying on two simple elements: dynamic pace and the lighting-design. By thoughtfully manipulating the pace of his dynamic POV-shots, Nagae agitates the spectator: we feel discomfort not merely because we are forced to share the experiential position of the main character, but because we are radically subjected to the flow of his pace – its slowness, the sudden moments of rest (Cine-note 1). At the level of the lighting-design, Nagae does not merely ominously bathe the spaces of the narrative in darkness, but also to emphasize the passive subjection of the spectator to the pace and shifting viewpoint of the main character. We, as spectator, are forced to let ourselves be oriented by the moving flashlight are feel threatened by what, due to our radical lack of control, remains in the darkish shadows.     

Nagae utilizes straight-forward moments of framing – moments where the spectator is merely present as a mere disembodied presence, not merely to somewhat alleviate the spectator’s uneasiness, but to subject him, from a different perspective, to what punctures as Otherness the frailty of the mundane frame. The director, moreover, utilizes these moments to insert more genre-related shots (e.g. slow zoom-ins) and interweave more elegantly framed moments within his composition – e.g. using the reflection of a mirror to frame a conversation between two cops.

However, what hurts the narrative is, in our view, Nagae’s refusal to go compositionally all the way – the ease by which he retreats into the field of conventional horror. While there are many   POV-sequences throughout the narrative, they become shorter and sparser as the narrative unfolds. Nagae, in this respect, does not fully realize the potential of the first person perspective and the shifts from being in control to being compositionally controlled for his horror-narrative (General-note 1).  

Nagae, however, also utilizes subtle musical decorations to turn the silence into sensible eerie atmospheric frame that fluidly amplifies dramatic revelations, accentuates brutal confrontations, and supports the sense of tension (sound-design). The director, moreover, relies heavily – a bit too much? – on volume-manipulations of his atmospheric sound-decorations to exploit the spectator’s fearful anticipation as well as his false sense of safety – Will the threat manifest itself? – and ensure that the jump-scares sort their intended effect – that this infractions, beyond unsettling the spectator, expose the insufficiency of the mundane frame to hold the disruptive Otherness back.

With The Convenience Store, Jiro Nagae treads well-trodden paths of J-horror – utilizing a similar narrative logic as Ringu (1999) – to deliver a straightforward horror-experience that works well for new-comers to the genre and young audiences in need for some thrills. However, in his attempt to heed the demand to craft something easily digestible that Nagae leaves the potential of the POV perspective severely underutilized.     

Notes

Narra-note 1: The gauged-out eyes of the victim is a brutal reminder of the blindness of the societal field, a confrontation with the fact that the subject either plays along with the societal game of repression or acknowledges the ravages caused by its ignored yet structural inadequacy.

Structure-note 1: The structuring of the narrative in chapters – Zeroth night, The First Night, Second Night, Third Night, Fourth Night, … – has a subtle foreboding quality as the spectator is unable to perceive what the ‘counting’ signifies. 

Cine-note 1: Some will argue that Jiro Nagae merely seeks to replicate the viewpoint of the game, yet such statement ignores the fact that the position of the spectator is radically different – from active agent to passive victim.

Sound-design: Nagae plays effectively with diegetic and non-diegetic sound-scapes and with the dimension of silence.

General-note 1: It is surprising that Jiro Nagae refrains from exploiting the promise the first-person perspective shows for the horror-genre despite having directed FPS (2024), an experimental horror film completely shot almost completely in first person perspective.   

References:

Simons, B. (2026, April 9). Let’s Play: Genki Kawamura and Jirô Nagae on a New Kind of Video Game Cinema – Filmmaker Magazine. Filmmaker Magazine. https://filmmakermagazine.com/133576-interview-genki-kawamura-and-jiro-nagae-exit-8-and-the-convenience-store/