If you’ve seen The Ring One and Two as well as The Grudge One and Two, plus The Messenger, Pulse, Dark Water and One Missed Call, then you’re probably going to see what’s coming with Shutter. Now the original Shutter was a Thai-made film released in 2004, as opposed to the others which were all J (meaning Japanese)-horror, but the fact of the matter remains these films all trade in a similar thematic and stylistic storytelling techniques. Consistency is fine, but a problem exists when you’ve repeated yourself so many times it gets stagnant. It happened to 80s slashers, it happened to the post-iconic 90s and it’s happening now with torture porn.

In Shutter, another newly married couple gets caught up in another ghost story. Ben (Joshua Jackson) and Jane (Rachel Taylor) are on their honeymoon in Japan when, while driving down a lonely stretch of road, Jane thinks she’s hit a young woman. There is no evidence to show that anyone was hit other than Jane’s word and the fact that the ghostly image of the same woman is now turning up on every photograph the couple takes. The clue is spirit photography; ghosts talking through pictures, and the ghost of the girl Jane thinks she ran over has a heck of story to tell as soon as Jane puts all the clues together.



This is one of those movies where I become obsessed with a nitty-gritty detail that sort of draws out my obsessive-compulsive bug. In this case it’s the fact that everybody seems to be using film cameras. Now if you know your spirit photography lore, than you are already fully aware of the fact that this phenomenon only appears on a picture that requires some kind of physical means of rendering a photograph. Thus it does not work with digital cameras. But what does everybody have now-in-days? Digital cameras.

So immediately we have an inherent contradiction at the basic nucleus of the film. Now I know a couple of photographers and unless it’s a special request from a client or a personal artistic project, they never use film anymore; they’re more or less 100 per cent digital. But what does Jackson’s professional photographer use? Oh yeah, you better believe it’s film. And what does the professional photographer at their weeding have? If you said film, you’re right. And what type of camera does Jane have? Well… she actually has a little pocket digital. But can she pick up ghostly images on it? You better believe she can.

If there’s one thing I can say for Joshua Jackson as an actor it’s that I can’t see him without thinking of his iconic role as Pacey Witter on Dawson’s Creek, which is a step up from when he started out on the Creek and all you could think about was The Mighty Ducks. In Shutter he’s kind of wooden and stilted, which is kind of the pace of the film but that doesn’t mean that the people have to be. Rachel Taylor is perhaps best known for her small part in Transformers last summer, but she won’t get a boost from this. The put upon wife is a thankless role as it is, and Taylor isn’t given much to do aside from looking concerned.

Shutter does earn a few points for trying to make things a little twisty at the end, but frankly I was unconvinced by it. It was a bad Scooby Doo ending although I did find the film’s final image a little leeringly creepy. (How apropos!) But this only came after nearly two hours of sitting through all the conventions and tactics of every one of the movies I listed at the top. Which are really, in actuality, the only ghosts that are haunting this thing in the end.