Dir. Parkpoom Wongpoom, Banjong Pisanthanakum, 2004, Thailand, 92mins, subtitles
Cast: Ananda Everingham, Nattaweeranuch Thongmee, Achita Sikamana
Review by Angus Macdonald
Shutter (or Shutter: They Are Around Us as it was titled in the US) joins the East Asian horror movement a couple of years too late. If it had arrived earlier then its use of now-clichéd frights could have been accepted as part of a current trend. As it is, the film groans wearily under the weight of the numerous horror films (themselves suffering from the same sense of over-familiarity) that have come before it, particularly the forerunners of J-Horror: Ringu, Dark Water and Ju-On: The Grudge.
The basic story here is of a young couple, (Tun, a photographer and Jane, his girlfriend) driving home from a party when they accidentally run over a young woman. Rather than leave the car and check on the victim or call for an ambulance, they decide to drive away leaving the body lying in the middle of the road. A few days after, Tun’s photographs begin to display odd images and ghostly streaks of light. Jane, wracked with guilt about the accident, starts having nightmares about the woman ghost and decides to investigate this further. Leading the couple to an expert of spirit photography, following the lights in a series of photographs to a creepy disused building and discovering the woman’s identity, Jane finds out the truth about Tun and the ghost that now haunts them.
The problem with Shutter is that it follows the formula too closely. It’s almost as though there’s a set of instructions as to how to construct this kind of horror film. All of the elements that have now become almost compulsory – the ghosts of friendless girls with long face-obscuring hair; spooks crawling and moving in mysterious ways; the haunting of modern technology – are present here like items to be ticked off a list. In Ring, the juddery long-haired female ghost haunts the present by means of a videotape; in Pulse, by means of a website; and in Phone, it’s a haunted mobile. There is no originality here – the long-haired female ghost gets to the protagonists through the means of a camera. The viral trend of this ghost story blueprint has stretched from Japan and Hong Kong over to Korea, Thailand and the US, suggests that the long-haired female ghost is going to haunt everyone through the means of film.
Making their feature film debut, directors Parkpoom Wongpoom and Banjong Pisanthanakum do try to keep things rolling along at a steady pace and on occasion manage to supply some moments of atmosphere. As the couple, Everingham and Thongmee give some likeable performances which help the audience to actually care about them. But ultimately, the film is fairly uninspiring or frightening.
Saying that, however, Shutter is one of those films which manages to pull something extraordinary out of the bag for its final scenes. If the viewer can manage to stick it out to the end, the final five minutes caps the previous lacklustre clichéd hour and a half with a bruising upper-cut of an ending. With an extremely haunting and moving final shot, Shutter at least lets you leave the film with a well-deserved chill.
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