Masayuki Ochiai, Shutter

Photo Credit: 20th Century Fox

by Freeman Montaque
03/23/2008

For a while there, it seemed like Shutter might not be so bad. The odds were stacked against it from the beginning, seeing as how it is a modern horror film and, therefore, likely to incorporate bad dialogue and overacting. A few minutes go by without anything too absurd happening, and you wonder if you underestimated the film’s potential. Once things are set into motion, however, and the plot begins to unfold, the film’s begins to lose a lot ground, and moments are created that are so ridiculous at times, they are laughably bad.

Young newlyweds Benjamin Shaw (Joshua Jackson) and Jane (Rachael Taylor) are in Tokyo spending time together for what was supposed to be a nice little honeymoon before Ben, a professional photographer, has to work. One night as Jane is driving the two, a girl, who would later be identified as Megumi (Megumi Okina), appears suddenly and is hit by the car. Jane and Ben crash off the side of the road, where both are knocked out for a little while before they both regain consciousness at about the same time. Jane, who seems to have been completely unfazed physically by their slight accident, runs into the street looking for the girl she hit, while Ben, his back a little injured, is convinced she probably just ran over an animal. Either way, whatever or whoever Jane hit, they’re not there now, and that seems to be good enough for Ben.

For what we can assume is a few days after the incident, Jane continues to worry about what happened that night, whether the girl survived or why she was in the middle of the street in the first place. Ben, on the other hand, is convinced that even though he didn’t see what Jane hit, it’s not a big deal, and they should just go on with their honeymoon as usual and not ruin it worrying about if they killed someone or not. Jane tries to do just that, until she begins to notice white blurs on photographs, and then she begins to see the face of the girl everywhere.

It’s pretty typical that for this genre, the person who sees dead or supernatural things is not believed by anyone at first. What makes Ben particularly stupid in this instance, however, is the fact that he deals with the same issues as his wife, yet he brushes everything off. While he’s setting up the shot for a major photo, Ben sees the girl appear in the photograph even though she’s not physically present. Considering the fact that Jane keeps telling Ben how she’s seeing a girl appear all the time, you would think he might relay that information back to her. Needless to say, he doesn’t. Another time, Ben’s in the dark room by himself checking on the pictures when that same girl not only appears in the photo, she spits out him, causing his face to drip with blood until one of his assistants enters the room and it goes away. He gets over that pretty quickly, too.

As is also to be expected of movies like this, a lot of the reactions from the characters seem odd. After a good portion of the film has passed, and we’ve established who Megumi is and why she’s haunting the couple, Ben and Jane both seem to have moments where they still don’t grasp the situation when the average person would have by now. After a long day of shooting, Ben lies on the couch in one scene, drinking a beer and just taking in some time to relax. Suddenly, a picture neither he nor any of his crew had set up is taken of him, and then the lights go out. There is obviously someone else in the room with Ben, trying to scare him as the flash goes on and off at alternating instances. Yet when he gets to feet, Ben asks, “Jane, is that you?” Does he really think that, given the circumstance, his wife would find now to be the appropriate time to scare him, seeing as how she is already appropriately freaked out herself?

This is not to say that Jane is constantly aware either. She has at least one moment of absentmindedness herself. After the death of his friends Bruno (David Denman) and Adam (John Hensley), Ben awakes one night screaming after Megumi appears in his bed apparently wanting to have sex with him. Jane wakes to ask, “What’s wrong, baby?” With all that’s happened with her and Ben’s friends, Jane has no idea what would make her husband wake up in the middle of the night screaming? Sure, there’s a slight chance he could been having a bad dream for some other random reason. But if you were Jane and you had to take a wild guess, wouldn’t you think that maybe, I don’t know, it had something to do with that dead girl who’s been trying to kill people the entire movie?

Something else that this film incorporates, along with what seems to be virtually every horror movie made presently, is characters who refuse to turn on lights. While this wouldn’t eliminate the threat of a ghost who seriously wants to kill you, it would at least allow you to see when you’re about to hit a couch while you’re running away. When Ben realizes that he was just fondled by Megumi in the dark room, he reenters the room, which itself is a questionable idea, and he fails to turn on any lights. Jane doesn’t flip any switches either once she and Ben enter Bruno’s house, even though she finds cut up pictures and blood on his living room table. Maybe the idea to keep the lights off is a judgment call, or a way to cut down on electricity. In any event, it never seems like the smartest idea when you’re being harassed by a ghost.

The last thing that stood out to me as being a major fault of the film was the rationale for what happened to Megumi. * Spoilers ahead! * To the ghost’s credit, I can understand why revenge would be a viable option. We discover that Ben was romantically involved with Megumi a long time ago. But the romance fizzled and he got tired of her, and she got clingy. So to teach her a lesson, he organized a plan that would involve drugging Megumi and taking pictures of her with Adam and Bruno. The point was to suggest that Megumi was loose, and this could be used against her if Ben wanted to, I guess, get a restraining order. It’s not shown, but it’s implied that during this event, Megumi was raped as well. So here’s the logic according to Ben: Megumi could possibly be incriminated for being slutty, as the pictures suggest, but the rest of the boys who sexually assault her wouldn’t face any punishment? As stupid as this sounds, Ben tells Jane that he and the others had no clue at the time how bad of an idea this was, even though he confesses to knowing it was wrong no more than a minute later. And, if he needs a stronger defense to back up his actions, he goes with a pretty foolproof defense: Megumi was crazy. Even if that was the case, which I’m not sure it was, how illogical is Ben’s plan?

Somewhere beneath the exterior, there may have been a decent horror film in Shutter. But the film is so poorly executed, particularly in terms of Luke Dawson’s screenplay, that it’s hard to find a silver lining. Just like most modern horror films, there are more flaws here than notable marks. Just like other Americanized remakes of Japanese horror films like The Ring and The Grudge, you’d probably be better off watching the original. And even if the previously aforementioned problems with the film don’t bother you, the scares are few and far between, as they, too, are tired and recycled scare tactics that don’t really scare.

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