Shutter

A Thai photographer begins finding inexplicable images in his photos, following a hit and run incident he and his girlfriend were involved in. Could the ghost of the young woman they hit be haunting him?

I had my fingers crossed that, as far as Asian horror goes, Shutter would be more Kiyoshi Kurosawa than Pang Brothers. Turns out it's something of an odd mix, but heavily leaning Pang: slow, quiet buildups to ridiculously overwrought, hyperactively edited, booming soundtrack, cinematic blunt force trauma payoffs. That kind of crap can sometimes be fun, but it gets old fast.

Shutter is particularly dull and generic, stringing together a bunch of Asian ghost movie cliches (including the pale female ghost with long black hair) as it unravels a particularly uninteresting "mystery." The film becomes increasingly silly as it goes along (despite becoming ever more self-serious), to the point where I was just kinda staring at the screen by the end, mouth agape, hardly believing what I was watching. I mean, I guess this is a first, but I've never seen one of these movies end where it turns out SPOILERS that the ghost has been sitting on the main character's shoulders for the whole movie and I guess it gives him back problems or something and he ends up in a mental hospital, mournfully sitting hunched over in bed with a ghost on his back. Just, wow.

Rating: D