Format: Streaming video from AMC through Amazon Prime on Fire!
Takashi Miike is a legendary horror director, but not every good or great director gets a hit every time they step up to the plate. I knew going in to One Missed Call (or Chakushin ari) the basics of the story. Essentially, people get a cell phone call from themselves that they invariably miss. The call they get is from the future, and essentially that call predicts their death. When the time arrives from when the call came, they die horribly, and someone from their list of contacts is called, and the cycle begins again.
I also knew about the American remake from a few years after Miike’s film. The American version of One Missed Call is legendarily bad. It’s remake of Pulse/The Wicker Man/The Uninvited levels of bad, scoring a 0% on Rotten Tomatoes. Honestly, the best thing I can say about Miike’s original is that it’s not the remake, but few movies are.
The plot is, ultimately, what is outlined above. People get phone calls that they miss. When they check their messages, they discover that the message has come from their own number, and from the future. The message is just a few words, and these are invariably the last words of the person before they are killed in some bizarre accident. The authorities assume that some of these deaths—falling in front of a train, falling down an open elevator shaft, etc.—are suicides, but in every case, the body is found with a red jawbreaker in their mouth.
After someone dies, someone from their contact list gets a call, and the cycle repeats. In each case, we see the phone of the person who has just died dialing, which somehow translates as the person on the other end receiving a call from themselves. I’m not sure how that’s supposed to work, because honestly, this would work just as well if the person in question got a call from the friend who had just died, but I didn’t write this, did I?
On the surface, One Missed Call has an original idea that is pretty interesting. Not a great deal is done with it, though, which is disappointing. Even more, it’s the sort of plot that could be pretty easily subverted by anyone with a moment’s thought. If people were dying every couple of days following this particular pattern, there are a few things you could do. If you received that call, for instance, while it would be too late for you, you could just erase all of your contacts. Oh, I’m sure that there’d be some sort of supernatural magic to make that not work, but no one even thinks this is worth a try.
A more mundane solution is to simply have no empty space in the phone’s mailbox. Hell, I have a completely full mailbox on my phone for a reason—it prevents my students from leaving me voicemails (because no matter how much I tell them not to, there are always a few who decide I didn’t mean them when I gave them the “text, don’t call” rule). You can’t get a deadly voicemail if you can’t get a voicemail.
One Missed Call has a few stylish moments and a few good scares, but in service of what? Everyone in this movie seems to do the dumbest thing they can at every moment in service of getting to the ending that is ultimately desired. Plot-motivated decisions (or indecisions) always feel like a cheat. If the only way you can get to the ending you want is to make your people dumb as a thumb, you’ve got problems with your basic plot.
Probably the biggest issue with One Missed Call is that it’s not really that memorable. It’s certainly not good enough to watch a second time, and it’s not ridiculously bad enough to be watched ironically. A few good scares don’t make this worth the time. If you want a really good J-horror movie with a terribly American remake, go with Pulse.
Why to watch One Missed Call: If you like Miike’s work, this is here for you.
Why not to watch: Everyone in the movie is an idiot.
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