The Asian horror re-make trend has definitely hit a dead end with this latest film, “Shutter“. As a fan of the sub-genre, including the terrifyingly well-spun “The Ring” and the traumatizing “The Grudge”, I was deeply disappointed with this re-made Thai import. All of the scares presented in the course of the story, we’ve seen seemingly a million times before, as the director and screenwriter borrow extravagantly from many, more successful scary movies. “Shutter” can’t shake the “been there, done that better” feel, as the audience is rarely made nervous by what unfolds onscreen, because it feels so darn familiar.
Benjamin (Joshua Jackson; TV’s “Dawson’s Creek”) is a professional photographer, and he marries Jane (Rachael Taylor; “Transformers“), who doesn’t seem to have a job and is more than willing to move to Japan, where Benjamin’s job is. On their drive through the rural countryside on their honeymoon, Jane thinks she hit something on the road. No body can be found and the couple try to forget the accident. Jane can’t shake the feeling she and her new husband are being watched. The pictures taken on their vacation have blurry spots, where a phantom fog covers part of the photo. Back in Tokyo, when Benjamin goes back to work, Jane starts to investigate what these blurry spots could be and learns about spirit photography. When strange things continue to happen and the mist starts to crystallize into the shape of a woman, Jane begins to take the warnings she receives seriously, trying desperately to convince Benjamin they are in trouble.
For much of the film, the entity is more of an annoyance than dangerous. The director doesn’t establish early enough in the film, whether the spirit is a threat or a messenger, causing confusion whether we - the audience - should be scared of it or not. The creepiest part in the movie is when Jane meets the editor of a spirit magazine, who talks about the real ghost photographs they receive for publication. The spirit photos shown on the walls of the magazine studio look much more threatening than the pictures Jane is concerned about. The editor is an interesting supporting character, played by James Kyson Lee of TV’s “Heroes” fame, but he is mysteriously dropped from the storyline after one scene.
The few scares there are in the film are too widely spaced to create any building tension. The basic plot seems pretty thin and stretches on for too long, until the very end when too much information is crammed into the last fifteen minutes. The revelation at the end doesn’t have the impact the director wants it to have, ultimately over-explaining where the spirit came from and who‘s responsible. Neither Jackson or Taylor have a strong enough presence to hold this flimsy movie together. Asian horror had given American audiences new, imaginative scares that we hadn’t seen before, but after “Shutter” audiences may be left wondering whether that well has dried up?
PG-13 for terror, disturbing images, sexual content and language.
