One Missed Call

Chakushin ari

Japan

2003

112 Min

Color

1.85:1

Japanese

Currently 3.0/5 Stars.
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PROD Yoichi Arishige, Fumio Inoue, Naoki Sato

SCR Yasushi Akimoto, Minako Daira

CAST Kou Shibasaki, Shin'ichi Tsutsumi, Kazue Fukiishi, Anna Nagata, Atsushi Ida, Mariko Tsutsui

Visionary horror film director Takashi Miike delivers a typically stylish and idiosyncratic scare-fest with this thriller. Yumi Nakamura (Kou Shibasaki) is a mildly paranoid young woman whose good friend, Yoko, receives a strange and mysterious call on her cell phone. The phone’s read-out says that the call came from Yoko’s own number, but from three days into the future; 72 hours later, Yoko dies in a bizarre accident moments after getting the same call over again. Yumi learns that Yoko isn’t the only person to have had this experience; the spirit of a vengeful woman has been creeping into people’s cell phones, and one by one is taking the lives of the folks in their internal telephone books. As Yumi struggles to solve the mystery of how and why this could be happening before someone else dies, she discovers the story has more to do with her than she imagined. Chakushin Ari was a major box-office success in Japan, where leading lady Kou Shibasaki is a popular recording artist as well as an actress.

Director

Takashi Miike

A contemporary of such noted film experimentalists as Tetsuo: The Iron Man [1989, maverick Japanese workhorse director Takashi Miike became one of the most talked about filmmakers in the international festival circuit. Despite the derailed manic energy of the aforementioned films, it was the stark relationship drama turned sadistic nightmare Audition that found the director receiving increasing international exposure. Audition succeeded in pulling the rug from under viewers as it turned the age-old image of the submissive Japanese female on its head with a shocking and nearly unbearable finale that had many horrified viewers shell-shocked. Born in Osaka, Japan, in 1960, Miike spent his childhood growing up in Osaka, where he eventually opted to study filmmaking at the Yokohama Academy of Visual Arts. Inspired more by Bruce Lee than Seijun Suzuki, Miike’s distinctive style came more as a result of not studying the traditional rules of filmmaking than a conscious attempt to break them… read more

A contemporary of such noted film experimentalists as Tetsuo: The Iron Man [1989, maverick Japanese workhorse director Takashi Miike became one of the most talked about filmmakers in the international festival circuit. Despite the derailed manic energy of the aforementioned films, it was the stark relationship drama turned sadistic nightmare Audition that found the director receiving increasing international exposure. Audition succeeded in pulling the rug from under viewers as it turned the age-old image of the submissive Japanese female on its head with a shocking and nearly unbearable finale that had many horrified viewers shell-shocked. Born in Osaka, Japan, in 1960, Miike spent his childhood growing up in Osaka, where he eventually opted to study filmmaking at the Yokohama Academy of Visual Arts. Inspired more by Bruce Lee than Seijun Suzuki, Miike’s distinctive style came more as a result of not studying the traditional rules of filmmaking than a conscious attempt to break them.

Miike views himself more as an arranger than an author, and his willingness to let a film develop on its own path and constant encouragement of actors and other crew members to flex their creative muscles has resulted in some of the most dynamic films of the last decade. His refusal to succumb to the traditional temptation to produce a film that will please the masses has also been a key factor in the development of his distinctive style, and further refusal to bend to widely accepted narrative structure has earned him both harsh critics and a fiercely loyal fan base. Miike’s films are also frequently targeted for their excessive and often gratuitous violence, though the director sites that the inherent honesty in that violence is more sincere than what he feels is his contemporaries’ romantic misrepresentation of current culture, viewing cinema as an important outlet for such images. Following his directorial debut in 1991, Miike turned out an exhausting 24 films (including two television miniseries) between 1999 and 2002, confirming his status as one of the busiest directors in world cinema. And though Miike may not be a household name, the release of such enticingly quirky and curious efforts as the comedy/musical/horror The Happiness of the Katakuris hints at big things in store for the tireless auteur.

(From http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=2:235203~T1)

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