Ben and Jane, newlyweds, move to Tokyo where Ben has received an attractive job offer as a fashion photographer. One evening, the couple is involved in a car accident in which they hit a woman wandering on the deserted road, but once they come to, Ben and Jane find no trace of the woman. In the following days, Jane begins to sense eerie presences that reveal themselves through photographs, and Ben starts suffering from an annoying pain at the base of his neck. Convinced that everything is connected to the mysterious accident, Jane begins investigating the identity of the presumably hit woman.
Ladies and gentlemen, after the remakes "The Eye" and "Chiamata senza risposta" and before "Riflessi di paura", the Italian cinematic year welcomes another American remake of a recent cult of Eastern horror filmography: "Ombre dal passato".
The original is titled "Shutter", it is a Thai ghost story directed in 2004 (but released in Italy in the summer of 2006) by the unpronounceable Banjong Pisanthanakun and Parkpoom Wongpoom, and represents an excellent example of a horror film based on a very successful tension and mystery. But it is known that every good success and every good idea of others is often devoured by the mecca of American cinema and re-proposed by the Hollywood machine to adapt to Western (or more specifically North American) culture and to avoid the annoying and often unprofitable distribution procedures of the original work. But as often happens, the remake does not have even a hint of the charm of the original work, and with this further demonstration called "Ombre dal passato", it is confirmed that "The Ring" was a very rare exception in a sea of useless mediocrity impressed on film.
We Europeans are often lucky and have the opportunity to see both the original work and the remake, but for the American public this is not always the case, and the original film, although sometimes available in specialized stores with English subtitles, swims in perfect distributive invisibility that makes the remake the only version known to the public. And in cases like this, "Ombre dal passato" is a real pity because one ends up losing a very successful horror film in favor of a faded and hurried ghost story that is forgotten too quickly.
The American version of "Shutter" could be easily retitled "Sciatter", just as it is pronounced, but not referring naturally to the shutter of the camera that is omnipresent in the film, but to underline the weakness of the feature film in question and the evident lack of enthusiasm with which it was completed. In practice, "Ombre dal passato" is the shadow (so to speak) of Thai "Shutter", like a blow-up, an enlargement, of the original in which the definition and overall clarity of the work are lost. The story, reworked by screenwriter Luke Dawson ("New York Stories"), is roughly similar to that of the inspiration film, but proceeds with the accelerator, eliminating any hint of psychological characterization and almost all the most purely horrific scenes of which Pisanthanakun and Wongpoom's film was pregnant. But the problem is that "Ombre dal passato" is still a bad movie regardless of the successful movie it draws inspiration from.
The basic structure is the same as any other film belonging to the ghost story genre, especially of Asian origin (curse of a resentful ghost revealed-mediated by a technological element, investigation, discovery of the presumed truth, purification of the deceased's soul through the discovery of his hidden corpse, final twist), here alarmingly similar to that used by Robert Zemeckis for "Le verità nascoste". This well-known and predictable scaffolding supports a slow and rhythm-less film, completely devoid of any tension, incapable of creating scares even with the overused game of alternating sound planes. The horror-horror scenes have been completely avoided, and even the rarest appearances of the ghost (all relegated to the last minutes of the film) take place and resolve as if nothing is happening.
To this is added a complete apathy of the two main actors, penalized by a screenplay that does not grant them the slightest characterization and forced to pronounce boring and banal dialogues. Then, if Rachel Taylor ("Il collezionista di occhi"; "Transformers") is at least physically suitable for the role of the little wife upset by Japanese ghosts, the perpetually childish and chubby face of Joshua Jackson ("The Skulls"; "Cursed # Il maleficio") does not make him credible at all in the role of the rising playboy photographer.
For his part, the Japanese import director Masayuki Ochiai, already the author of the disturbing and cryptic "Infection", does not add the slightest personality to the project, producing the classic commissioned movie that this time is not even enhanced by any particular care of the photography or sets.
The only advice that can be given is to overlook this boring supernatural thriller and perhaps recover (for those who haven't seen it yet) the original "Shutter", which offers a story articulated in a more convincing way and a series of beautiful scenes rich in tension.
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