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Shutter

Scary snapshot develops into a very poor print

Friday, May 16, 2008

No-one does horror quite like the Japanese, but this latest picture is a blur, says Noel McAdam

Joshua Jackson, Rachael Taylor, Megumi Okina, David Denman, John Hensley

Ask any critic. The first rule of film reviewing is: avoid cliches like the plague. Nevertheless ... scary folk, those Japanese.

At the risk of racist stereotyping, I don't just mean the kamikaze tendencies, the self-harming game shows and the computers nobody else can figure out.

Or even the way their tourists hunt in packs entirely surrounded by a full body armour of cameras.

It's the whole range of horror movies they've been responsible for in recent years — The Ring, One Missed Call, The Grudge, etc — which we usually have to endure twice over. The American re-make is traditionally followed up with the, most often better, 'original'.

This latest one, however, isn't just out of Japan, it is also set in Japan. And its director, Masayuki Ochiai, is from Japan where he is well known as a writer as well.

Basically this is a variation on the ghost in the machine cliche, the machine in question being — you guessed it — a camera.

Just-married Jane and Ben have their eyes wide shut when they appear to knock down a strangely-clad woman, while lost and distracted on a dark back road somewhere outside Tokyo.

Their car crashes and, when they come round, they can find no trace of her. Then she starts to appear, at first as a blip or a shadow, in photographs ... even of their recent wedding. (Next time you collect your film look, check those smudges and marks, they could be parts of your own past come back to haunt you.)

Before long it's clear the lady in the pictures, who is actually out of the picture, is intent on revenge. Shutters aren't actually shutting things out, they're letting them in.

For example, Ben (Joshua Jackson from Dawson's Creek and Cruel Intentions) has a colleague who enjoys watching the other kind of birdies, until his wings are cruelly clipped.

Generally slow-paced, so that its mere 85 minutes feels much longer, there is much discussion in this film along the lines of strong emotions being able to make themselves manifest through the medium of photography, and so on.

Shutter speeds up briefly, however, when the deceased woman finally appears to the man with whom she has, of course, a strong emotional attachment.

From this point though Shutter becomes almost an object lesson in how not to do it.

Even the camera angles are lousy and the story, in large measure, often out of focus. It becomes about as engaging as an hour spent looking at the family holiday snaps of your most irritating neighbours.

Neither creepy nor suspenseful, neither spectral nor spectacle, it lumbers along until, when the protagonist is seen sitting on a verandah in skeleton form, it finally, inadvertently, crosses the threshold into funny.

All you wanna do is shutt'er down.

Of course you've guessed the 'secret' long before it's finally revealed but — with insanity asylums another Japanese movie trademark — it can't help move from mirthful to rediculous.

It's not simply a case of saying 'cheese', it's cheese over a melted toastie, with added cheese.

Shutter copies and references so many other movies it looks and comes across like a photo-album you've seen a thousand times before.