THE 100 CANDLES GAME: THE LAST POSSESSION | ©2025 101 Films

Rating: Not Rated
Stars: Nacho Francavilla, Josefina Fariña, Justina Ceballos, Zhon Li, Iris Cayatte
Writers: Camilo Zaffora (“The Last Possession”), Jeronimo Rocha (“Arcana”), David Ferino (“The Fortune Teller”), Maximilian Niemann (“Five Minutes”), Jorge Bano (“Let Her Go”), Andres Borgui (“Behind the Door”), Daniel Shafer (“Black Moon”), concept by Michael Kraetzer
Directors: Guillermo Lockhart & Charly Goitia (“The Last Possession”), Jeronimo Rocha (“Arcana”), David Ferino (“The Fortune Teller”), Maximilian Niemann (“Five Minutes”), Arie Socorro (“Let Her Go”), Andres Borgui (“Behind the Door”), Ryan Graff (“Black Moon”)
Distributor: 101 Films
Release Date: January 13, 2025 (U.K.), January 14, 2025 (North America)

THE 100 CANDLES GAME: THE LAST POSSESSION is a quasi-sequel to 2020’s THE 100 CANDLES GAME. These are both horror anthologies with a wraparound (the concept is credited to Michael Kraetzer) that lends itself to the format.

The 100 Candles Game, we are told, was developed in sixteenth-century Japan by samurai warriors. The game requires its players to sit around a circle of 100 candles, with each person telling a horror story for each candle. When a player has finished telling his or her story, they must take their candle and go alone into a room with a mirror, where there is no light except for the candle. They must not come out until the candle burns out, and the game must be completed, or a horrible curse will follow.

It’s probably not too spoilery to say that horrible curses are lurking around every corner, with or without the completion of the game. In the first movie, we wondered how they were going to get through 100 stories in under two hours of screen time. We’ll just say that a bit of meta temporal cheating was involved.

In THE 100 CANDLES GAME: THE LAST POSSESSION, we at least see onscreen how they get around not having to go through 100 narratives in a seventy-three-minute movie.

There are no obvious carryover characters from the first film – it’s remotely possible that the possessed woman we see at the start is someone from the original, but the performer is different.

THE 100 CANDLES GAME: THE LAST POSSESSION begins not with its framing device, but rather with one of the segments, “Arcana,” written and directed by Jeronimo Rocha. We are with a chained-up, sclera-eyed woman (Iris Cayatte), who looks plenty possessed. She is surrounded by a salt circle, but one of her jailers, apparently unversed in how to keep the woman from escaping, throws her a tin of food that skids through the salt line. We spend the next eight minutes of screen time watching the woman dig through her food, eat a couple of rats, and figure out how to free herself.

While Cravatte deserves applause for her perfectly committed performance, eight minutes feels long when it’s devoted to this kind of action. Because “Arcana” is so long and comes right at the start, we wait patiently for it to connect to THE 100 CANDLES GAME: THE LAST POSSESSION’s wraparound, but it doesn’t. (There’s a possession, but it’s not the one from “Arcana.”)

The framing sequences, group-titled “The Last Possession,” are written by Camilo Zaffora, and directed by Guillermo Lockhart, who was also on the first 100 CANDLES, & Charly Goitia, who’s new to the series.

We meet ambitious vlogger Dylan (Nacho Francavilla) as he and his camera are trekking through a forest with friends Amber (Josefina Fariña) and Cheryl (Justina Ceballos). They are shortly joined by their compatriot Koji (Zhon Li). Dylan informs us that the possessed woman from “Arcana” (which apparently was a story he was telling, though we don’t hear it) fled into these very woods, which also have other monsters – but we don’t hear about them.

In the tradition of many horror movies, anthology and otherwise, it is Dylan’s brilliant idea to livestream the four of them playing the 100 Candles Game in huge, secluded Stonewall Manor, reputed to be an exceptionally haunted house. The house’s history is one of the tales told. We’re never sure if Dylan thinks this is all for clicks, or if he genuinely expects something to happen – which of course it does.

Most of the segments are very good. “The Fortune Teller,” written and directed by David Ferino, puts an added layer of menace on a childhood game that practically everyone remembers (even if nobody can remember what it was called). We can broadly guess what’s happening in “Let Her Go,” written by Jorge Bano and directed by Arie Socorro, but it still manages to be suitably creepy. “Behind the Door,” written and directed by Andres Borgui, has a new spin on how and why a session of asking the dead might get out of hand. Other segments are decent.

THE 100 CANDLES GAME: THE LAST POSSESSION occasionally has obvious English-language dubbing. It also has an issue that it shares with many of its anthology brethren, which is that sometimes the framing material is contradicted by the independently-made episodes.

Still, the production values are handsome, there is pleasing variety and invention in the individual pieces, and much is accomplished in a relatively brief running time. With its final sequence, THE 100 CANDLES GAME: THE LAST POSSESSION declares it intends to continue as a franchise. It seems an overall worthwhile endeavor.

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