Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 9 (One Missed Call)

(CW: physical abuse)

Well, good God, this movie took a bit of an unexpected turn thematically. It will be tackled, of course, even though I feel a little out of my depth both in tone and culture. Before that though, the central premise! Which reminds me, in its own way, of The Ring. I haven't actually seen The Ring, mind, so I don't know what deep thematic stuff is going on under the hood in that movie and if it ties to the deep thematic stuff going on under the hood in this movie. By premise, though, you can see it, yeah? A spooky message haunting a method of communication that warns of your imminent death, that spreads once it gets you, and has a creepy girl ghost at the heart of it. Hell, both even use older forms of tech that the passage of time has made obsolete; The Ring's central haunted object is a cursed VHS tape, whereas One Missed Call haunts pre-iPhone cell phones. Time has already made the haunted object at the heart of the film a relic, and that only adds to the spooky nature in hindsight.

On the face of it this is a really good and spooky idea, and seeing it play out multiple times is wild. More to the point, the movie's got a sense of mystery about it, trying to uncover clues and decipher what in the fuck is killing people. It leaves your mind racing as you watch, packing away facts here and there to be paid off at the end. There was a point where I thought this was some sort of Final Destination-like predestiny trap, where once you hear the message of yourself from the future screaming as you die, your fate is set in stone. That's not what's happening here, but the ghost who sends you a message of you dying before she kills you a day or so later is so persistent and ever-present that it may as well be fate. Throw away your phone, go into protective custody, it doesn't matter. This ghost is going to get you and kill you. Why, though? Is it some sort of metacommentary on the increasingly connected world via the cell phone? It's not, thank God. A worse movie, a movie with this premise made just a decade or so later, could delve into that, but this movie doesn't. The cell phone thing is a unique method, a framework for the real story, the real motive. So what is it? Why does this ghost send you your death message on the phone days in the past?

Because she's physically abusive. Now we get into the heavy shit. One Missed Call is a movie that is very much about physical abuse and the effect it has on abuser and abused, even from beyond the grave. The eventual story that unfolds over the movie's clues and mystery is of a young girl who has both asthma and Munchhausen Syndrome By Proxy. She abuses her younger sister, then gives her candy in return for silence. One day she's caught, has an asthma attack, and her mother flees with the hurt and crying younger sister which leads the abuser to die. Now she's a vengeful ghost who spreads via the network of cell phone contacts, even going so far as to leave candy in the mouths of her victims. Our lady protagonist, Yumi, is a girl who we eventually learn was abused physically by her mother but has escaped that family hellhole of pain and hurt. Even so, the abuse has fucked her up as abuse does, and it's a harrowing and terrifying series of events that leads her down the path of being toyed with by the abusive ghost. The wild thing is the movie tells you what it's going to be about, 10 minutes in, with a psychology lecture on abuse and its cyclical nature. That's exactly how the damn film ends, too. It's even got some terrifying mirror shit in it for good measure. 

One Missed Call is honestly way heavier than I expected it to be, and it's a subject that's taken as seriously as can be in a movie about a pissed-off ghost who kills you using your own cell phone against you. Worse movies would ham it up and deflate the seriousness of the subject matter, but this movie manages it. It's harrowing and horrifying in its honesty about the nature of abuse, and by the end of the movie you don't even really need a string to connect the abuse allegories with the cell phone shenanigans. You get a little one, but it's almost a bait and switch. You go in expecting one movie and get something quite unexpected, quite raw and real and potentially traumatic to some. Not an easy movie to recommend, and one where some CWs are needed, but an intriguing Japanese horror film that I squeezed enough out of for a writeup.

Say, what other interesting movies does Japan have in its back catalogue?