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One Missed Call (Chakushin Ari) Japan
Yoko receives a voicemail message dated three days in the future, which consists of screams that sound suspiciously like her own. Three days later, at the exact time of the call and with the same piercing scream, Yoko plunges to her death from a railway bridge.
Roping in the creepy curses of The Grudge (MIFF 2003) and the terrifying child corpses of the Ring films, in One Missed Call Miike Takashi simultaneously has fun with the themes of recent smash-hit Japanese horror films and adds his own disturbing contribution to the list.
Passing from friend to friend, mobile to mobile, the spectral phone hauntingly claims a succession of victims in increasingly strange and bloody ways. Yumi is desperate to halt the trail of death amongst her pals. She teams up with a solitary funeral director, Hiroshi, whose sister was killed by the same unstoppable curse. Yumi's best friend, Natsumi, gets the call; desperate and doomed, she agrees to appear on a live TV broadcast and undergo an exorcism at the precise moment she is predicted to die.
'The level of tension and horror that The Grudge achieved is matched and at times outdone by One Missed Call. Miike has made the scariest film I've seen this year!'-Ain't It Cool News
D Miike Takashi P Kuroi Kazuo S Miwako Daiwa WS Horizon Entertainment L Japanese w/English subtitles TD 35mm/Col/2003/112mins
Miike Takeshi was born in Osaka, Japan in 1960. Films include: The Bird People of China (MIFF 1999), Audition (MIFF 2000), Gozu (MIFF 2003).