One Missed Call

Yesterday's J-horror:

10/30: A few years ago I went to a midnight showing of a J-horror (Japanese horror) film entitled Tokyo Gore Police (which, if you haven't seen, go watch the biggest what-in-the-fuck ever) at the local art house theater here in Albuquerque. Before the film the film editor from a local indie paper got up and talked a little about the movie. He said this: "If Japanese films are any indication of how the country is everyone must be going completely apeshit constantly." With my relatively few forays into J-horror I don't think I can think of more apt statement, with Takashi Miike being probably the standard by which to draw the definition of how nuts Japansese filmmakers are.

With One Missed Call, though, Miike plays it largely quite a bit straighter then oh, say, the clusterfuck that is Visitor Q. One Missed Call is more of a straight up Japanese ghost film a la Ringu, and I even worried for the first half that maybe Miike had lost his voice in trying to make the traditional Japanese ghost movie. However, the second half threw all those worries away and created probably the best J-ghost horror I've seen. 

I watched the movie late at night on my laptop with headphones, no lights on whatsoever. And man... what a way to watch. Essentially the movie is about a group of teens who begin receiving calls from the future of their own deaths. These, of course, predict their death and the end up dying at the predetermined time. The scene that really got me sitting in the dark was near the end as the main character visits an old hospital and is tormented by the evil spirit. It's claustrophobic, things happen just in the periphery out of focus, and I found myself falling into the characters head; where is the next bit of horror going to come from? It feels all very Miike, somehow. From where I was sitting I was facing a huge mirror that was reflecting the light from my computer and I found myself momentarily horrified I would look into it and see the ghostly figure in the film. When a movie gets you like that you know you're watching something good.  

As a whole, the movie overall felt much more effective than something like Ringu which kind of stands largely as the face of the genre. One Missed Call is a different turn than most of Miike's violent fare that gets talked about the most but none the less shows just how capable a filmmaker he is. The movie is a still a bucket o' Japanese madness but in a more subtle way. One Missed Call is terrifying, chilling, and it sticks with you--especially that god damn creepy ringtone.

9.5/10