By Eric Kohn

One Missed Call
Directed by Eric Valette


When it comes to scary movies, the Japanese have it figured out. Unfortunately, commercial filmmakers in the United States usually don’t. Hence the spate of remakes: Since the successes of The Grudge and The Ring—two English-language makeovers of popular J-horror titles—the lack of ingenuity has resulted in virtually endless reiterations of boring scare tactics. The devolving effectiveness is fully apparent in uninspired sequels to both aforementioned works, and now it has hardened into a dull mass of boredom in One Missed Call.

So why waste ink on a forgettable knock-off that hardly made a dent in the box office last weekend? Because its overseas translation reveals the steep plummeting of intellectual expectations from a genre that desperately needs them. The 2003 original, directed by the prolific auteur Takashi Miike, essentially functions as a satire of technology: A handful of careless teens begin receiving prophetic voicemails forecasting gruesome deaths. Although there’s some murky backstory about a ghost haunting the ill-fated youth, Miike turns the phone itself into a villainous gadget. Each ring from one of the bewitched devices signals a sense of dread. As the prophecies start coming true, the survivors begin to regard their phones as cryptically violent entities. The transition implies an innate division between humanity and its digital add-ons.

In the American remake, the phone is just another eerie object beckoning from the shadows. Interestingly enough, director Eric Valette follows the plot from the original so closely that the lack of depth drifts to the surface. An equally chilling and absurd moment from Miike’s version finds one of the doomed women appearing on a television program for a faux exorcism, her fate broadcast to millions.

As the moments until her demise tick away, Miike cuts to seemingly unrelated shots of a crowded Japanese marketplace. The show plays on a large screen at the center of the city, but the pedestrians pay no heed. With this clever juxtaposition, Miike raises suspense (as death draws near) and blatantly mocks the way madness can lurk in plain view while the public turns a blind eye. Vallete trades this impressive sequence for a needlessly goofy priest stereotype twiddling his fingers over a restless phone and beckoning the evil to rise. Eventually it does—but the cameras don’t capture it. Without the notions of public implication or credible media exploitation, the original idea gets watered down. 

Miike treats his characters as equally culpable in the joint sin of technocratic indulgence, and every major character faces mechanical retribution. The remake of One Missed Call, however, gives us a boring hero and inexplicable redemption. It has a strong cast, including Edward Burns as an inquisitive detective and Shannyn Sossamon (Wristcutter: A Love Story) as the last teen standing, but they’re given interminably lame dialogue (“The girl’s right! There’s gotta be some kind of connection here!”), leaving us to admire how they occasionally manage to carry the material. Now that’s creepy.