Shutter

Jackson: Wandering hands

Poor Joshua Jackson… the guy just can’t catch a break in Hollywood. As the leading light of Television series Dawson’s Creek, Jackson’s career path was set for super-stardom and yet things just haven fallen into place.

Take this film example, a remake of a Thai horror film, which should have been a big hit. It wasn’t. It’s not even that it’s a bad film, it just feels lacking in that certain something… and that could be the problem with its leading man as well.

A newly married couple spend their Honeymoon in Japan, which conveniently also happens to be where they decide to spend the rest of their lives together.

Ben (Jackson) is a successful fashion photographer and has just got a lucrative contract and his wife Jane (Rachel Taylor) is completely supportive.

On their first night however whilst driving on a poorly lit rural road they hit a woman and crash. As Jane regain consciousness she quickly goes to save the woman, but no one is there.

The couple continue about their lives but strange things begin to happen when Jane notices that every picture she has taken appears to show ‘ghostly’ images.

She finds herself believing in a phenomenon known as spirit photography, which apparently shows the dead trying to make contact with the living.

Convinced that it is the woman she ran over Jane desperately tries to find out who the woman was, and what she wants…

The set up of the film requires a certain level of ignorance to the ‘J-Horror’ genre. Like The Ring and The Grudge before it, the films biggest problem is location.

Shutter opts for the latter’s approach of moving the majority of the action to Japan but this merely brings up the most obvious of questions… if the setting is so crucial to a film like this then why remake it at all?

Surely the cultural identity is just as key (Sprit Photography is very popular in Japan for example) so why place an American couple in the midst of this story?

To be fair, Shutter is a lesser-known movie and the story itself works well.

Jackson and in particular Taylor are very good… Jane maybe prone to the ‘walking down the dark corridor rather than running in the opposite direction’ syndrome common to all genre films, but at least Taylor makes for a convincing and likeable heroine.

The film has a much darker edge in the latter half, and it is as Jackson’s character unravels that we see something original in this sort of film. The male character being unable to save the day… although common in J-horror this is still relatively rare in Hollywood.

So it looks good, the acting is fine, the story is interesting enough… what’s the problem? Well unfortunately somewhere along the line director Masayuki Ochiai and writer Luke Dawson forgot to put in the frights! Barely a pulse is raised throughout the film’s short runtime making Shutter a competent but forgettable experience…

2.5/5

This review was brought to you by Screenjabber.com

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