One Missed Call (Chakushin ari)

 One Missed Call's premise almost reads like a parody of J-Horror: Young people in Tokyo start receiving a voice message from themselves, timestamped from a couple days in the future, which plays out their last few seconds before they die. And once they inevitably bite it, someone in their contacts list gets a similar message. Oh, and these calls always arrive with a creepy ringtone!

 Not even the Mighty Takashi Miike can save this story (screenplay by Miwako Daira, from a novel by Yasushi Akimoto). He can, however, make it look stylish (there's some terrible-looking camera effects early on, but luckily it simmers down quickly - the rest of the movie goes down very easy). And the sub-genre's conventions - already ossified back in 2003, when this came out - are almost always engaging.

 The plot of the movie hews very, very closely to the template set down by The Ring. Once it becomes apparent that there's some sort of supernatural menace preying on her university friends, Yumi (Kô Shibasaki) starts trying to find out more about the curse, with the help of a mysterious slightly older man (Shin'chi Tsutsumi) who's been on the case since the beginning. The investigation leads them to a family with a history of violent abuse (a major plot point) and a few pretty effective scares.

 No psychics in this one, thank goodness; Well, actually, there is one -an exorcist- but he's part of a fairly funny subplot about a TV show that catches wind of the ghostly phone calls. One of the few cases of a J-horror movie (successfully) sneaking in some satire - the only other one I can think of right now is Suicide Club.

I wonder if Marie Kondo ever had to deal with shit like this. Now there's an idea for a J-horror movie!

 The investigation -a traditional element of the ghost story which almost always lends structure to J-Horror- is interesting, and while the plot ends up tangling itself into knots by piling on multiple twists and red herrings and a (very obvious) Ringu-style fake-out, there are some genuinely cool reveals. Most of the time, though, it's dumb and derivative. Not to the extent that it stops the movie from being fun, but enough that it overshadows almost everything else.

 Miike's pretty restrained here - it could almost pass for a normal teen-oriented J-horror flick. A good-looking one, though, with good atmosphere. And he and his frequent editor Yasushi Shimamura pull off some unshowy but interesting sequences where the past intrudes seamlessly into the present. There is some fun stuff with the hapless police department (led by regular Miike collaborator Renji Ishibashi), the aforementioned TV production crew, and an excellent, very disgusting apparition later on.

 To be perfectly honest, some of the dumb parts are pretty fun, too, like a severed hand busily operating a clamshell phone, or an attempt to foil the curse by cancelling a mobile plan. I mean... come on, that's pretty funny; I did wonder if the whole thing was taking the piss, which is something I've found myself pondering a lot over the years while watching even the most craftsmanlike of this particular director's movies. It's an auteur thing. If this one is tongue in cheek, though, it's plays it too safe, staying too faithful to other, oh-so-serious J-Horror staples.