Home > Movies > Movie Review > Movie review: 'Shutter'

Movie review: 'Shutter'

Japanese horror imitator fails to frighten

By Roger Moore

Orlando Sentinel
March 20, 2008

• Email
• Print View
• Share
  • Digg
  • Del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Furl
  • Google
  • Reddit
  • Spurl
  • Yahoo
• Add To Favorites
• Add to playlist

1 1/2 stars (out of four)

 The influence of the Japanese school of screen horror on Hollywood has led to a string of subtler, less violent and yet still chilling ghost stories, remakes of Japanese originals such as “The Grudge,” “The Ring” and “One Missed Call.”

 When they don’t work, they’re pretty darned boring stuff. “Shutter” is a textbook example. This uncredited remake of a 2004 Thai film has been Nippon-ized with Japanese settings, supporting cast, director, crew and sensibilities. It has its moments. But even at 86 minutes, it’s a drag.

A newly married couple, blandly played by Rachael Taylor and Joshua Jackson, head off to Japan for a photo shoot assignment the husband (who used to live in Japan) has landed. But his pictures aren’t turning out. They have these wispy reflections, which he attributes that to gear failure. Jane, his wife, sees something else and she asks around. Darned if these aren’t “spirit photos,” images of ghosts, which are old hat to the Japanese, who even have a magazine devoted to shots of dead relatives reaching out to family members and the like. Snapshots are ways “of connecting us with the unseen,” Ritsuo, the publisher (James Kyson Lee) explains. “I think they’re trying to tell us something.”

 Well, yeah.

 Jane and Ben had a car accident. Might the girl Jane was sure they hit be the spirit shadowing the couple? What does she (Megumi Okina) want? No, that’s not hard to guess. But as we follow Jane, established early on as the jealous type, we’re treated to a few decent frights as the ghost makes her presence felt and seems bent on revenge. Clever scenes in a dark room and a darkened photo studio have bite. Unfortunately, little else in the film does.

Director Masayuki Ochiai (“Infection”) may know a few cool locations to park his camera, but he fritters away what mystery there is in the script and shortchanges us in scenes that, in Hollywood hands, offer standard-issue chills — a visit to a medium, the mounting suspicions of the paranoid couple. As a result, “Shutter” is seriously short on shudders.