‘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).