The movie starts in 1969 with this kid who stole something from an old woman's cart. A psychic tries to help him, but this demon called the 'Lamia' drags the kid straight to hell anyway.
Then we meet Christine, who works at a bank. She's nice but really wants a promotion. Her coworker is a jerk who lies and cheats, so he might get promoted instead of her. When an old woman named Mrs. Ganush comes in begging an extension to her mortgage, Christine says no to look tough to her boss. The old woman gets really upset and security drags her out.
Later, Mrs. Ganush attacks Christine in a parking garage. During the fight, she rips a button off Christine's coat and puts a curse on it. She tells Christine she's going to hell. At first, Christine thinks the old woman is just crazy.
But then weird stuff starts happening. Christine hears noises, sees things, and gets attacked by invisible forces. She goes to a fortune teller who tells her the truth - she's cursed. The demon is coming for her in three days, and it's going to drag her to hell.
Christine tries everything to break the curse. She even sacrifices her pet cat to try to make the demon happy, which is horrible. There's this dinner with her boyfriend Clay's rich parents where she's trying to act normal while being tortured by the demon. It's both funny and scary at the same time.
Clay believes her and spends his own money to hire the old psychic from the beginning. They try to trap the demon in a goat during this crazy ceremony. But the demon kills the psychic and escapes. Christine is running out of time.
The fortune teller tells her she can pass the curse to someone else, even a dead person. So Christine goes to the cemetery in a storm and digs up Mrs. Ganush's grave who died from grief. She puts the cursed button in the dead woman's mouth. The supernatural stuff stops, so she thinks she's safe.
The next day, Christine is happy again. Clay wants to propose to her on a train trip. At the train station, he gives her an envelope and says it belongs to her. When she opens it, the cursed button is inside. She realizes she gave Clay the wrong thing - she put a regular coin in the grave, not the button.The coin was just a regular coin from her purse that she grabbed by mistake when she was panicking in the dark cemetery, but she needed to put the actual cursed button in the dead woman's mouth to transfer the curse.
The ending is really brutal. As Christine stands there shocked, demon hands come out of the train tracks and drag her to hell while Clay watches. He can't do anything to help her. The movie ends with his heartbroken face.
What makes this movie so disturbing is that Christine doesn't really deserve what happens to her. Yes, she was mean to the old woman, but lots of people make selfish decisions at work. It's not like she murdered someone. Meanwhile, her coworker who's actually a terrible person gets no punishment at all. The movie doesn't care about being fair.
The movie came out during the housing crisis when lots of people were losing their homes to banks. So watching Christine deny that loan feels extra cruel. You think about real people who suffered because of decisions like hers.
Sam Raimi, the director, mixes scary stuff with funny stuff in a weird way. There's a scene where a possessed goat yells curse words at Christine, and the old woman attacks her by gumming her face. You're laughing, but you're also watching someone's life fall apart.
The scariest part is how powerless Christine is. She tries magic, she tries religion, she tries everything, but nothing works. The curse doesn't care that she's sorry or that she's trying to fix things. It's just this unstoppable force coming for her no matter what.
The movie is basically about how one bad decision can ruin your entire life. Christine trades her kindness for a job promotion, and it costs her everything. It's like a really dark lesson about corporate America - the movie is saying that when you work for companies that hurt people, you might pay a price too.
What really got to me was the ending. Christine was so close to being free, but she made one small mistake and it doomed her. She didn't fail because she was evil - she failed because she grabbed the wrong envelope when she was scared and desperate. That's such a human thing to do, which makes her fate feel even more unfair.
Alison Lohman, who plays Christine, is really good at making you feel sorry for her. You see her trying to be a good person while also being selfish and ambitious. When she's digging up that grave in the rain, you feel how desperate she is. And that moment when she realizes she has the wrong envelope - watching her face change from happy to terrified is heartbreaking.
The boyfriend Clay's reaction at the end really stayed with me. The actor Justin Long shows this perfect mix of shock and grief as he watches the woman he loves get taken away. You feel genuinely sad for both of them, which isn't what you expect from a horror movie.
The movie asks this uncomfortable question: does Christine deserve to be tortured forever for one selfish choice? Most people would say no, but the movie doesn't care what we think is fair. It shows a world where bad things happen to decent people just because they made the wrong choice at the wrong time.
That's what makes it truly scary. It's not about monsters jumping out at you - it's about the idea that one bad day could damn you forever, and maybe there's nothing you can do to fix it. That's way more frightening than any demon.
The movie pretends to be a fun, silly horror film, but it's actually pretty depressing. It sticks with you because it feels like it could happen to anyone. We all make selfish decisions sometimes. What if one of those decisions had consequences we could never escape?
Sam Raimi is working on a sequel, which is interesting because I have no idea how you would continue this story. Christine's gone, Clay's traumatized, and the demon is presumably satisfied. Maybe it'll follow a new person getting cursed, or maybe Clay will try to get revenge. Either way, I'm curious to see if Raimi can capture that same feeling of unfairness again.
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