[Film Review] The Convenience Store (2026)

Anyone who’s ever spent any time in Japan will likely be familiar with the allure of the convenience store. The humble konbini is so much more than just a place to buy cheap coffee and cigarettes – it’s a beacon aglow on even the darkest of nights, where a fluffy egg sando or crisp sliver of Famichiki awaits, the convenience store serves as a reminder that you are never too far from creature comforts, and the company of another human being. However, in Jirô Nagae’s The Convenience Store, which has its International Premiere at FrightFest Glasgow on March 7th, the liminal quality of the establishment in question conceals something much more terrifying than having to order at the counter in broken Japanese.

Based on the hit indie game of the same name by developer Chilla’s Art, The Convenience Store stars Kotona Minami (Ice Cream Fever) as Yukino, a young college student working a part time job at the titular shop. Her mundane night shifts consist of serving customers, restocking shelves and trying to fix the pesky automatic front door that keeps opening despite nobody actually coming in. When a deliveryman hands over a mysterious package containing a single SD card, Yukino’s once so simple life is thrown into turmoil and terror.

Nagae has become a staple in the modern Japanese horror scene, with his works like Kisaragi Station, The Samejima Incident and The Spirit Behind the Door all exploring the scariest of Japan’s vast catalogue of urban legends, and monstrous myths. This makes him, on paper, a great fit to adapt one of Chilla’s Art’s most famous games, as the indie duo also specialises in bringing to life the eeriest of local ghost stories, with titles such as Teke Teke, Aka Manto and Yuki Onna.

In The Convenience Store, Nagae once again demonstrates a great eye for scares, clearly influenced by the J-horror masters like Hideo Nakata, Takashi Shimizu and Kiyoshi Kurosawa, the latter’s proficiency in terrifying spaces evoked faithfully by the sinister dark corners that lurk throughout the store.The Convenience Store is at its very best when Nagae lets viewers sit in discomfort and silence, questioning the validity of what they’re seeing in the shadows.

However, the film stumbles on the same hurdles that many video game adaptations do, chiefly by misunderstanding why the source material works so well. Opening on a grisly murder scene, The Convenience Store sets itself up for failure when it comes to crafting the same tense, subtle atmosphere that the game does so beautifully. While it’s tough for any game-to-movie adaptation to really capture this immersion due to the inherent differences in medium, The Convenience Store’s overreliance on predictable jumpscares and fakeouts do little to conjure the uncanny sense of calm that makes this spectral story such a memorable one. 

Similarly, Nagae attempts to flesh out the wonderfully mysterious original by inserting a subplot with a detective (Terunosuke Takezai), but constantly cutting between the two means we never truly get a sense of the mundanity of Yukino’s work day, and thus the creepy contrast between tedium and terror that the game illustrates so well is never established. Sequences shot from Yukino’s POV do deliver on aesthetic chills, but don’t really add anything to the narrative, instead feeling like forced reference to the source material. The Convenience Store also has the misfortune of being understandably compared to the superior Exit 8, Genki Kawamura’s adaptation of a similarly liminal Japanese indie horror title that manages to faithfully elicit the simple scares of the game while also adding a subplot that enhances them. 

However, when it comes to The Convenience Store’s success as a video game adaptation, it could be much worse. Put it up against this year’s Return to Silent Hill, for example, and you’ve got a masterpiece on your hands. At a neat 83 minute runtime, there are more dire ways to spend a cinema trip, especially with a FrightFest crowd in tow. Just like a konbini itself, The Convenience Store might not deliver the most memorable time of your life, but it’s worth a visit regardless.

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