The remake of a same-named 2004 Thai film, enervated horror flick Shutter, which opened last week without benefit of advance screening for critics, tells the story of a young American couple vacationing in Japan who cope with a vengeful ghost and try to unravel the mystery of a woman they may or may not have hit with their car. Listless performances, overly familiar visual iconography and unimaginative set-ups render the movie worthy of nothing more than a shrug — even from the less demanding under-15 set for which it was chiefly designed.

Among wide new releases, Shutter placed third for the weekend, pulling
in $10.4 million at just over 2,750 theatres. That total fell well
short of fellow freshman entry Meet the Browns, but somewhat
surprisingly edged out the more aggressively marketed Drillbit Taylor,
starring Owen Wilson. Steep fall-off and a lack of positive
word-of-mouth will hardly matter with this modestly budgeted picture,
designed from the get-go to earn a quick, quiet buck. Two or three more
overshadowed weekends in theaters will eventually yield to modest, par
pay-cable and DVD earnings, placing Shutter even or slightly ahead of
2006’s Pulse ($20.2 million domestically, $9.5 million
internationally), another PG-13 horror film remade from an Eastern
property.

Following their wedding, Jane (Rachael Taylor) and Ben Shaw (Joshua Jackson) head straight to Japan, their honeymoon doubling as a work
assignment for Ben, a fashion photographer. En route to Tokyo by car at
night, the pair suffer an accident on a snowy back road; Jane insists
they struck a woman. Plagued by both unnerving visions and spectral
distortions in photographs they’ve taken, Jane and Ben deduce the woman
to be Megumi (Megumi Okina, above right), a translator and former needy girlfriend
of Ben’s from a previous work stint in the country. More havoc ensues,
and Jane, already a bit grabby and needy, begins to wonder if Ben is
telling the full truth about the extent of his relationship with Megumi.

For a fleeting moment or two early on, Japanese director Masayuki
Ochiai (Infection) seems committed to at least crafting a movie with a
definitive sense of style, but a small handful of in-frame effects and
interesting compositions quickly give way to pedestrian framing and
desultory jump-scares.

That the film’s signature moments of dread and shock come via another
pale-faced, wet, dark-haired girl — a figure of menace already roundly
skewered by the Scary Movie series, among others — is perhaps
unfortunate, but not an insurmountable impediment to tension. The
sociocultural isolation of the setting could be used to the story’s
advantage, to feed especially Jane’s sense of unease and
discombobulation. Instead, though, Luke Dawson’s script offers up lame set-ups (visits to
a psychic investigator and Megumi’s house) and perfunctory dialogue
that requires Jackson’s character shift back and forth in sympathy to
his new wife. As such, even the nominal twist in the film’s final third
feels tacked on, and silly.

As in last summer’s Transformers, which at least had the excuse of
giant, clamorous robots distracting one’s attention, Taylor utterly fails to make an impression one
way or another. Former Dawson’s Creek star Jackson, meanwhile, invests wholeheartedly in exactly
one emotion for each scene, and otherwise just lets his stubble shade
the characterization. For the full original review, from Screen International, click here.