Metacritic Film

Shutter

Starring Joshua Jackson, Rachael Taylor, David Denman, James Kyson Lee, and John Hensley

MPAA RATING: PG-13 for terror, disturbing images, sexual content and language

20th Century Fox
Horror  |  Mystery  |  Suspense/Thriller
minutes | Color
USA
Released In Theaters March 21, 2008

For photographer Ben and his new wife Jane, his new assignment--a lucrative fashion shoot in Tokyo--was supposed to be a kind of working honeymoon. With this exotic professional opportunity and the limitless possibilities of a new marriage, Ben and Jane arrive in Japan. But as they make their way on a mountain road leading to Mt. Fuji, their new life together comes to, literally, a crashing halt. Their car smashes into a woman standing in the middle of the road who has materialized out of nowhere. Upon regaining consciousness after the accident, Ben and Jane cannot find any trace of the girl Jane believes she hit. Shaken by the accident and by the girl's disappearance, Ben and Jane arrive in Tokyo, where Ben begins his glamorous assignment. Having worked in Japan before and fluent in the language, Ben is comfortable there, and he eagerly reunites with old friends and colleagues. Jane, a newcomer to the city, feels very much like a stranger in a strange land as she makes tentative, unsettling forays through the city. Meanwhile, Ben has discovered mysterious white blurs--eerily evocative of a human form--that have materialized on an entire day's work from the expensive photo shoot. Jane's concerns escalate as she believes the blurs in Ben's photos are the dead girl from the road, who is now seeking vengeance for them leaving her to die... (20th Century Fox)

WRITTEN BY
Luke Dawson

DIRECTED BY
Masayuki Ochiai

Overall Metascore

This is a weighted, normalized average of all individual scores given by critics, on a scale of 0 (worst) to 100 (best).

37 / 100

Critic Reviews

75 TV Guide Maitland McDonagh
Surprisingly effective supernatural tale in which there's more to fear from the living than the dead.
63 The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Stephen Cole
Shutter has the look and feel of a proper J-horror film. Tokyo is seen as a series of gloomy gun metal skies. And the acting is more subdued than in Hollywood horror movies.
50 Boston Globe Michael Hardy
If Shutter is any indication, the reputation of professional photographers is still on the wane. Not only are photographs creepy, the film suggests, but so are photographers.
42 The Onion (A.V. Club) Scott Tobias
The photography hook gives Shutter the potential to be a genuinely creepy ghosts-in-the-machine story like the original "Pulse," or better still, a horror twist on "Blowup." But one effective scene lit solely by a camera flash isn't enough to rescue this from the J-horror slushpile.
42 Entertainment Weekly Clark Collis
Seems like a technological regression.
40 The New York Times Andy Webster
The director, Masayuki Ochiai, conjures textbook J-horror miasma: clammy clinical interiors; overcast skies; diffuse cityscapes. He also gives Alfred Hitchcock a nod, with a sequence nakedly stolen from “Psycho,” and draws unease from Jane’s disorientation in a foreign city. Tokyo, in fact, may be the movie’s most fascinating player.
40 The Hollywood Reporter Frank Scheck
Genuine scares are few and far between, and the climactic explanation for the ghost's appearances comes as something less than a revelation.
40 Variety Dennis Harvey
A blandly cast and crafted remake of the same-titled 2004 Thai pic that itself emulated J-horror norms, which seemed a lot fresher back then.
38 San Francisco Chronicle Andy Webster
Fans of J-horror (for Japan, where the genre was born; its conventions have since spread to South Korea and Thailand) will find Shutter familiar; others may just doze.
30 Village Voice Luke Y. Thompson
Ostensibly a remake of a Thai film--by a Japanese director with a Hollywood cast--this plays more like a video copy of "The Ring" that’s been so degraded that all the good bits are no longer visible.
25 ReelViews James Berardinelli
Asian horror remakes are typically not screened for critics, and Shutter is no exception. The studios know what they have: watered-down, lifeless shells of motion pictures devoid of characters, drama, or anything remotely resembling horror.
20 Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov
The very Thai-specific charms that made the original Shutter such an unforeseen, unpredictable delight when I first saw it – and when I screened it again, last night – are almost entirely absent here, eclipsed by the annoying blonde highlights of Taylor, ex-Transformer babe and forever, as the Thai say, farang.

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