The Convenience Store

Based on Chilla’s Art PC game, the film adapted by director Jirô Nagae reveals its PC origins early on.

There’s first-person angles and the general scope of the film doesn’t drift too far from PC game play, though I have not played this particular game.

Looked at purely as cinema Nagae does a sterling job of building dread and fear. The opening is stark with the brutal murder of mother and her child by husband/father.

The film centres around student Yuki (Kotona Minami) who relieves her colleague for the night shift at a convenience store. It’s drab and the place has a stale air of melancholy about it even without strange things happening and the strangeness of the people around it: a ravenous old man, who says he knows the secret, and a woman in black dress. Is it haunted? Well, the store's doors slide open for no reason with their sound and chimes becoming ever more annoying.

Within the store they discover of the manager dead with no eyeballs, which then gets the cops on the scene and Yuki under investigation. Adding to the weirdness is the delivery of a sim card one of a set for Yuki.

The story develops over several nights with some repetition though with important adjustments and different perspectives. In many ways this is quite a conventional JHorror with several of the expected tropes dropped in that may or may be in the game.

There’s very little in the way of characterisation; and the film doesn’t suffer from that. The people serve the narrative’s purpose of taking forward the story, building tension as it goes. The film flits from first person to third efficiently pulling the various elements together for a satisfying conclusion.

The Convenience Store had its International Premiere at FrightFest Glasgow, March 2026.