SHUTTER
May 3rd 2008 13:24
Stars: Joshua Jackson, Rachael Taylor, David Denman & James Kyson Lee
Duration: 85 Minutes
Asian horror films reworked to suit American tastes have been a cash stuffed piñata that studios have well and truly beaten to a tattered pulp. Filtering the brooding Asian horror sensibility through the jump’n’scare approach of American fright fests proves a difficult task. Nevertheless, they keep trying, beginning with The Ring’s success, followed soon after by Pulse, Dark Water, The Grudge, The Pang Brother’s The Eye and now the Thai horror remake: Shutter.
Benjamin Shaw (Joshua Jackson) and his wife Jane (Rachael Taylor) are honeymooning in rural Japan when they are involved in a car accident en-route to photographer husband Benjamin’s latest assignment in Tokyo. Amidst the crash, wife Jane sees a young Japanese woman, who then promptly vanishes. After the accident, any photographs taken of the couple are imprinted with the ghostly image of the same young woman. As the couple investigate, they uncover the mysterious world of ‘spirit photography’ and the possibility that the ghostly apparition may be trying to tell them something.
Easily one of the lamest U.S. Asian-horror ‘do-overs’, Shutter suffers from a serious lack of threat and indeed, horror. The slow burn, moody stylistics and painfully annoying sub-woofer rumblings, stuff the gaps that the threadbare plot and predictable scripting fail to cover. The casting of uber-lightweights Jackson and Taylor doom the film to drown in its own mediocrity, as they divest the story of any believability or legitimacy. Director Masayuki Ochiai employs impressive experiments in moody lighting, aided in no small part by Cinematographer Katsumi Yanagishima (Battle Royale, The Grudge 2) until the whole flailing mess collapses under the weight of its own failed plot logic and comes off as sub-Ringu and sub-sub-Grudge, failing to haunt let alone scare.
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