SHUTTER

Photographer Tun returns by car with his girlfriend Jane from a dinner with friends, but in a moment of distraction, they accidentally hit a woman who was on the side of the road; in a panic, the two flee without helping the woman. The next day, Tun looks for information about the woman who was hit, but discovers that no body has been found and no one has filed a report. From that moment on, Tun begins to notice changes in his health and sees in all the photographs he takes a strange, ethereal figure that resembles a young woman; while Jane begins to be haunted by disturbing visions that also feature a young woman. The prolific Eastern cinematic market has shown in the last five years a marked interest in the horror genre and especially in ghost stories, garnering critical and public acclaim and allowing Asian cinema to finally be known worldwide. It is inevitable that the proliferation of a particular product leads to market saturation, so much so that, even in the case of the Eastern-style ghost story, a rich array of titles has been seen, often mere imitations and of poor quality, leading to the collapse of the genre itself: we are now at the end of our rope, it is inevitable, and much of the films of this type that are released are nothing more than the tired repetition of the same stories, the same characters, and the same scenes. However, once in a while, there is a product that stands out, that shines in the midst of the opacity of the repetitive genre, and the Thai "Shutter" belongs precisely to this exception. The film directed in 2004 by Banjong Pisanthanakun and Pakpoom Wongpoom is naturally the rehashing of the same formula already seen and reviewed dozens of times, from "The Ring" to "The Call", in which a ghost (woman) seeking revenge makes the daily life of some people unbearable, preferring manifestation through a technological medium; hence if in "The Ring" there was the videotape, in "Kairo" the website, and in "The Call" the cell phone, in "Shutter" it is the camera that serves as a medium between the world of the living and the dead. Fortunately, however, in this case, the camera is not simply the object carrying the curse, but simply the means that reveals the ectoplasmic presence, thus relating to a series of beliefs and traditions that want the photographic medium as capable of capturing the spiritual aura, a theme cleverly and effectively developed also by the console video game "Project Zero". The structure that supports "Shutter" is clearly built on the model of previous films of the genre and often perfectly mimics the sequence of events, thus resulting rather predictable for the more experienced viewer; but despite this "Shutter" still manages to captivate thanks to a rather fast pace and to develop an original personality that sets it apart above the average of the latest productions belonging to this genre. As often happens with films of this genre, the strong points of "Shutter" are the ghost appearances, often original and truly unsettling (above all the long sequence on the stepladder); but in this case, the story is not subordinated to the easy scare, as happened in "Ju-On", but rather, much importance is given to the narrative construction of the film, filling the film with plot twists and reversals of meaning, up to a desperate and poignant ending. In short, despite the lack of originality and the predictability of some narrative solutions, "Shutter" remains a high-level product, capable of involving, captivating, and scaring. Surely we are facing one of the most successful clones of "The Ring".