‘Sometimes spirits long for their loved ones…’
I love a ghost story, the issue is that since the advent of the Paranormal Activity franchise, Hollywood has been churning out ghost stories left, right and centre, many of them indistinguishable from one another. I expected something a little different from Thailand’s Shutter, a nation not perhaps renowned for its horror history, and something a little different I eventually received.
Tun (Ananda Everingham) and Jane (Natthaweeranuch Thongmee) are a seemingly normal couple on the cusp of settling down and living happily ever after. When a tragic accident seems to be linked to strange lights and patterns appearing on Tun’s photographs however, things soon start to take a turn for the sinister.
If that concept sounds vaguely familiar, that’s because it is. Ringu and its subsequent American remake both loom large over everything here, and indeed, the first half an hour shares similarities with a myriad of ghost stories that have been released over the years. Just when I was losing faith however, Shutter pivots into something else, and then something else again. The nightmarish conclusion that lurches from one terrifying ordeal to the next saves Shutter from being just another ghost story and instead elevates it into a horror movie of real substance.
I think there is a tendency among western critics to falsely inflate the worth of foreign language horror films just because the sheer otherness of them renders them creepy and unfamiliar. Not here though. Shutter deserves to be remembered as one of the more innovative movies to drop in the wake of Samara Morgan and that damn videotape.