Straight To Voicemail: This Japanese Horror Film Is One Call You Don’t Want To Miss
Takashi Miike’s One Missed Call (Chakushin ari) rips through horror convention, a forwardly subversive ghost story comfortably nestled within domestic commercial expectations. Miike, known for radical genre films like Audition and Ichi the Killer, seemed a strange choice for what is ostensibly another entry in the canon of early aughts J-horror. All of the hallmarks are there. It’s high concept, it stars a cute young woman who later teams up with a gruff, older man, and the titular baddie is broad enough to iterate upon elsewhere. So it’s no surprise that One Missed Call was remade in the United States in 2008 with director Eric Valette at the helm. It’s also no surprise that when remade, One Missed Call all but upended the import of Japanese horrors. Post-2008, they simply weren’t commercially viable.
That tenuous commercial viability is present, though not pronounced, in Miike’s original, released 20 years ago this month in Japan. While domestic genre fans often scoff at the idea of remakes, regularly arguing it’s better to leave well enough alone, for some films, the argument of “well enough” is difficult to make. When released in Japan, One Missed Call was a commercial success but a critical misfire. Even Western audiences scoffed at the sheer excess of tropes Miike and writer Minako Daira crammed into one single movie. That is to say, One Missed Call was far from a classic, and unlike several other movies derided upon release though later reclaimed, few are clamoring to argue One Missed Call is an unsung classic.
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In fact, on its anniversary two decades later, even I’m not prepared to make that argument. One Missed Call is very good, though I’d be remiss to compare it to something like Hideo Nakata’s Dark Water or Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse. Those films remain the apotheosis of early aughts J-horror. Where their remakes failed in adapting culturally specific anxieties for a broader audience, One Missed Call never committed itself to a distinctly Japanese feel to begin with. It’s there on the periphery (Miike is too talented for it not to be), but among the pantheon of early aughts imported ghosts, One Missed Call was the most accessible.
Where the remake failed, however, was not in anything innate to the original’s conception, but instead on account of Miike not being behind the camera. With him helming One Missed Call, convention became combustible, familiarity rendered violent freneticism. One Missed Call might be familiar, but it’s a crueler, grimmer ghost story than many of its high-concept peers. The idea of a phone call predicting one’s death Final Destination style, on the surface, sounds like a PG-13 teen shocker. With the 2008 remake, it was.
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Miike, while constrained by the material—material that does, I concede, follow every expected beat—manages to elevate the supernatural shenanigans at every turn. Take, for instance, the death of Natsumi (Kazue Fukiishi) around the movie’s halfway point. Coerced into a televised exorcism, Natsumi hopes the rituals and shamans will help with excising the curse after she receives a call of her own. Of course, it’s unsuccessful, though the public display of brutality is just as shocking 20 years later. Rather than being killed in private, Natsumi’s death is televised for all to see. She is brutalized by an unseen force, her arm twisted around her neck until her head pops off. That’s Takashi Miike for you.
Most of One Missed Call plays out much the same. Thematically and narratively, it’s nothing new, but Miike layers his nihilism and penchant for brutality over the proceedings, rendering them not necessarily new, but exciting nonetheless. Even the finale is nothing but a fun house of screaming specters, obscure visions, and overwhelming audio cues meant to jolt an audience to screaming life. The excess is the point, and it works. It no doubt accounts for why the movie endures as a curiosity two decades later despite never having been conceptualized as anything more than competent by both critics and audiences.
One Missed Call may not be a classic of J-horror, but it’s a pretty damn good one. As horror iterates and expands, it’s a solid, consistent shocker, one replete with the tropes audiences love and an extra dollop of gore for the skeptics. While I wouldn’t rank it among the best—and not even among Miike’s best—it’s one I am always thrilled to revisit. As One Missed Call turns 20 this year, consider answering the phone.
Categorized:Editorials
