Oct 112003
 
three reels

Yumi Nakamura (Kou Shibasaki) and her friends are having a more or less pleasant evening out (that’s as good as it gets for Yumi, who has never completely recovered from her childhood abuse) when one of Yumi’s friends checks her voice mail to find she’s gotten a call from the future—from herself—indicating the time of her death.  Ignoring the implications, the friend goes about her daily affairs and dies right on time.  Yumi learns that the girl wasn’t the first to die, and it soon becomes clear she won’t be the last.  Apparently, an angry ghost is using cell phone contact lists to choose victims.  Eventually, Yumi’s number turns up, and with the help of a man who’s sister was an earlier victim, she attempts to discover the source of the evil.

After the Ringu films, the One Missed Call series is the most popular in its native country.  It is also the most derivative.  On paper, One Missed Call is Ringu.  Once again, due to a piece of ever-present technology, people are, one-at-a-time, given the bad news that they are going to die in the near future, and they’re given the exact time.  They can’t hide.  Wherever they are at the specified time, a ghost finds them and that’s all she wrote.  A girl, who’s next in line, partners up with a guy who isn’t in direct danger, to uncover what horrible event started the curse.  Naturally, it involves a mistreated girl, and a twist when they realize they’ve got it all wrong.  Yeah, that all sounds familiar.  If it doesn’t, skip this and pick up the superior Ringu.

So, this is a copy, but copies aren’t always a bad thing.  If you re-watch films, you must not mind seeing the same thing again and again.  As far as duplicates go, One Missed Call is a good one.  What it lacks in originality, it makes up in fear.  After Ringu and Ju-On, this is the creepiest J-horror film, at least of the fifty or so I’ve watched.  Sure, the scares are as derivative as the story, but they still work.  Pale, contortionist girls, hands reaching out of nowhere, figures suddenly behind our heroes—the favorite clichés of J-horror are here, and they’ve rarely been used to such exquisite ends.  Things start out tense and work their way to hysteria.  During the fifteen minutes when Yumi is searching an abandoned hospital, you’ll want to keep an annoying friend around to poke you with a sharp stick so you’ll remember to breathe.  If you go to horror flicks to feel that rush of adrenaline, then you’ll be pleased.

On the other hand, if you go for anything approaching sense, you’re not going to be happy.  At the end of Ringu and Ju-On you can piece together most of what happened, and anything still open for interpretation doesn’t contradict what you know.  Not so here.  Once the big mysteries are revealed, the film falls into a goopy tar pit of incoherence.  There is no way to fit it all together.  (It’s a hoot to check out Internet boards where fans trip over themselves trying to explain it all, and rarely do two people come up with the same answers.)  Some of the more problematic items in the script are:

  • We see the ghost kill, and then find out that isn’t the killer ghost at all.  (Did this ghost like to go out for crawls and pretend to kill?)
  • Cell phones don’t have any connection to the ghost (not the real ghost that is, just the red herring ghost).
  • Two important characters might be dead, or might be alive; they might be in their own heaven or doomed.  There’s no way to know.
  • One character might be a reincarnation of another, or is leading a parallel life, or travels in time.  Again, there’s no way to know.  And oops, did I say one character?  Make that four characters.

One Missed Call doesn’t play fair.  Many Asian-horror films say that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, but this film just chucks philosophy.  Three too many twist endings are stuck on, and each is another step toward parody.  But then that could have been the point. Earlier, a low-life TV producer puts a soon-to-be victim on the air along with fake psychics and exorcists and a death clock counting down the seconds; this is a step out of horror and into satire, so perhaps the whole films is meant to be a gag.  The difference with the TV bit is that the joke works.

The failings are significant, but I can’t ignore that this is one hell of a bone-chilling thriller.   It’s a mess, but it’s a scary mess.

It was followed by One Missed Call 2 (2005) and One Missed Call Final (2006).  The story was also made into a ten episode series in 2005 with different characters and events, and even a different ghost; that title is also translated as One Missed Call.  A U.S. version is coming out in 2008.

Prolific Director Takashi Miike has a vast range of genre credits, ranging from blood soaked gangster epics to children’s television shows.  On this side of the Pacific, he’s best known for his shock and gore dramas Audition and Ichi The Killer and among cult fans for the taboo breaking Visitor Q.