 Attempting to do the technophobic thing with cell phones what the Ringu franchise did for haunted video tape, Takashi Miike provides a slick & effective horror story.
One Missed Call is not as raw, artistic, or spooky as Audition, but it's a good film with more internal consistency than most Japanese horror flicks, scene for scene packed with great deal of tension.
Kou Shibasaki stars as Yumi, a young woman whose friends are one by one receiving mysterious cell phone calls announcing their demise, followed by sundry gruesome accidents.
The film goes well beyond its excuse for goriness & stretches its imagination. When Yumi's closest friend gets the infamous call telling her she'll die, by then an exploitation news program has gotten hold of the story & brings her on a live show to "protect" her with an exorcism. And the esoteric priest who attempts the exorcism puts on quite a program!
Halfway through the film it becomes evident that Yumi's hidden past connects her somehow to the weird murders/accidents.
Once the story turns its attention to laying the horrific violent ghost & revealing Yumi's back-story, the film loses a lot of its edgy strangeness & turns into rather more ordinary J-horror, with some editing problems that make the final moments merely muddled & confused. But even with anclimax weaker than the build-up, it's a rewarding film.
copyright © by Paghat the Ratgirl
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