| The Movie: Strange things seem to get haunted in Japan, be they televisions or lockers or, in the case of Takashi Miike's One Missed Call, a cell phone. Starting off in the familiar vein of Ring, we see a young woman who misses a call on her phone only to check her voice mail to find out that the call actually came from two days from the present – that's right, she got a phone call from the future. What does she hear on the message? Her own voice, screaming in terror, but for what reason she doesn't know, and she'll never find out as two days later, she's found dead. From here, we learn that her boyfriend fell victim to a similar fate. From here the horror seems to spread through the built in phone book that was in the first girl's cell phone and the next victim is their mutual friend, Yoko (Anna Nagata) but by the time it gets to her, she's clued in to the fact that something is going on and she doesn't intend to take it lying down.
Through a strange set of circumstances, Anna manages to get herself booked on a live television show that covers strange supernatural events precisely two days later, and has an exorcism performed on TV in hopes of cleaning herself of whatever vengeful spirit is making its way through cell phones across Japan. In hopes of helping Yoko, her best friend, Yumi (Kou Shibasaki), recruits the aid of a supernatural expert named Hiroshi (Shinichi Tsutsumi) to figure out just what's wrong with the phones, where the ghost is coming from, and why it is so angry. After some digging around, all signs point to a creepy old apartment but just as the start putting it all together, Yumi misses a call on her cell phone and the countdown begins…
As ridiculous a concept as it might be, One Missed Call actually works fairly well. The first half of the film does a fantastic job of building the suspense up to a point where it really does start to get a little creepy, and Miike's direction, played almost completely straight this time out, suits the material rather well. Pacing wise it starts off with a very strong scene and keeps up that momentum for a good half hour before things slow down to, of course, explain some of the back story behind the vengeful ghost responsible for the whole mess at which point the movie starts to flutter a little bit before picking up again for the last half hour.
One of the more mainstream films from Miike to see a legitimate DVD release in North America, the film definitely plays by the rules that were firmly established in earlier Japanese horror releases such as the better known Ring and Ju-On but manages to one up them in terms of creativity and flat out weirdness once it all wraps up. The ending might throw some people for a loop but it just serves to remind us that as palatable as the film is, it is still a Takashi Miike movie and as such, is prone to strange things happening for even stranger reasons (or sometimes no reason at all). You're not going to experience anything even remotely close to some of the director's more popular genre efforts such as the blood soaked Ichi The Killer or the breast milk soaked Visitor Q, but a few of his touches are definitely there and One Missed Call is all the better for it.
Though the film looks and sounds like most of the other recent Japanese horror movies that follow along the same lines, there are some clever examples of moody lighting and a few interesting camera angles that keep things interesting. The sound mix is also quite well done, using eerie effects, hollow sounding ring tones that seem to come from somewhere not quite of this world, and the odd jump scare to build atmosphere nicely. It's conventional, fairly predictable, but well made and well acted and it delivers enough of the creepiness that it promises to succeed even when it probably shouldn't.
Final Thoughts: A decent Japanese ghost story with a couple of inventive twists... While One Missed Call lacks the inventiveness of some of Miike's better films, it's an entertaining and spooky movie in its own right, even if by this point in the game it's a little clichéd. Recommended. |
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