While watching movies for review, I often take notes on my iPhone, as I did for Shutter. Tellingly, the device infamous for incorrect autocorrections wanted to change “Shutter” to “Shitter.” Given that “shutter” is a legitimate word, I can’t explain the switcheroo; perhaps, as in this film, otherworldly forces beyond our understanding were trying to tell me something.
Shutter, shitter: It fits. Shudder.
Newlyweds Ben and Jane Shaw (The Skulls’ Joshua Jackson and Transformers’ Rachael Taylor, respectively) move from the U.S. to Japan for his new job as a fashion photographer. Driving late at night to their new digs, Jane runs over a young Asian woman who suddenly appears in the middle of the road, then loses control of the vehicle and plows into a tree. Both Shaws emerge with only minor scrapes; the woman is nowhere to be found, nor is blood, let alone any trace of her to suggest she existed as nothing more than a figment of Jane’s weary imagination.
If so, that’s some imagination, because subsequent photos taken of and/or by Jane develop with inexplicable smears of white. Ben’s assistant refers to them as “spirits,” so to whom should Jane turn for counsel? Why, Tokyo’s own “spirit-photography magazine,” of course! (Want more unbelievability? The publication appears to have a paid staff of 10.) What do these spirits start to do? Kill people, of course!
A remake of the 2004 Thai film of the same name, Shutter exists as one of many substandard Americanizations of Asian horrors — Dark Water, Pulse, One Missed Call — that smothered our multiplexes in the aughts, following the wave created by The Ring and The Grudge. In keeping with those films, director Masayuki Ochiai (Infection) gives Shutter’s story space to breathe. That is a nice way of saying it’s slow. But a slow burn, it is not. Unworthy of its slight time investment, it is a humorless piffle that checks off the boxes with duty and without enthusiasm.
Only at the denouement does the movie break from its sleepiness long enough to convey a jolt. I’ve yet to conclude if that twist is truly clever or utterly ridiculous; then again, I stopped thinking about it the next morning — already several more hours than the whole deserves. —Rod Lott