I've noticed that B-grade horror directors always try to scare us with otherworldly visitors, plate-throwing spooks, etc. but, as Kubrick wondered, why be afraid of ghosts? It's proof of life beyond death! This is why A-grade directors like Kubrick, Dreyer, Miike, Hitchcock, and Shymalan, realize that the true horror is existence itself, incomprehensible in its mortality, its suffering, its hopelessness. We all die; therefore, WE are the ghosts. It's the same kind of reversal you see in that Casper short where he meets a living human child and screams, the same way the boy screamed upon seeing him.
In One Missed Call, Miike quietly confesses to a deep, profound spirituality that was only apparent beforehand in his obvious contempt for everything and everyone who lacks Buddhist poise ( and the only character who even had that was Grandpa in Happiness of the Katakuris: "Yeah!" ) The movie is split into two parts. The first is a parodistic one involving lots of cell phones and tropes from The Ring, Ju-On, and other recent J-horror movies. I admit this phenomenon never made any sense to me, it was just visual noise based on memories of Poltergeist and Japanese folk tales. But Miike, who makes movies the way other people write 800-page books of philosophy, converts pop-culture dross into Renaissance-art gold, drawing out and savoring the connection, only hinted at in The Ring, between the way technology gives us the illusion of having superhuman capabilities ( talk to anyone on earth, at any time of the day! send them a video of yourself doing jumping jacks naked! ) but fails outright to protect us from the inevitable: death. You know that dread you feel when your Internet connection breaks down and you're "cut off from the world"? Miike exploits this modern fear to the limit in the greatest horror scene since the one in the shower, or 9-11 itself -- I'm talking about the very public death of Natsumi Konishi.
The second half of the movie tracks the heroine as she tries to locate the source of the malevolent phone calls who are picking off her friends left and right, hoping to escape the same fate. Her journey eventually takes her to a disused hospital, where the film's second great scene takes place, as death reaches out to life, as the departed try to close the gap between them and us. Those expecting to be "scared" won't be; others who know how to watch films without expectations, and may have seen Ordet or Vampyr, will find this scene to be curiously sorrowful and moving unlike anything they've seen before. The movie would have been a classic if it had ended here, but Miike, as he always does, spins out his concept to dizzying, unimaginable lengths, as the movie begins to concentrate more on its hero, Hiroshi, who seems to embody a very Christian kind of ethos: "When knighthood was in flower" and all of that, like Orlando Bloom in Kingdom of Heaven. I won't spoil the ending, but as he discovers, the "ghost" turns out to be a variant of Ichi, from Ichi the Killer, a destructive innocent, and it's the hero's sympathy, his capacity for loving the unlovable, that not only saves his life but wins him eternal love and eternal childhood -- the symbol for which is the candy that he rolls about in his mouth in the final shot.
No point in complaining that One Missed Call is too mainstream. Like so many other crossover movies, from Gangs of New York to Lovers on the Bridge, future generations will discover that genuine subversion resides in the collision between mainstream values and the truth; in fact, that collision IS the truth: Independent purity duking it out with the world, rather than sitting in its iron lung, all spotless and lily-white. Who wants to see a movie where the director rigs his own little belief system, his own critics, his own executioners? Every indie director, if he wants to be a great director, needs to make a large-budget film, needs to expose himself to the incomprehension and disappointment of critics, who are, though it's not often said, more of a threat to progress than the masses. Miike must find their disappointment, like that of the sadistic fanboys, proof that his quest is a true one.
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