One Missed Call

Takashi Miike’s original Missed Call was a hit in Asia without being a classic, but tapped into the modern obsession with mobile phones, so a Stateside reworking was inevitable.

Pretty, young Beth (Sossamon), a psychology student, begins to suspect otherworldly forces are at work when two of her friends die in fatal accidents.

One of them, Leann, played Beth a phone message seemingly left by Leann herself two days in the future speaking her final words.

As other friends start getting one missed calls with similarly freaky messages, Beth teams up with Detective Andrews (Burns), whose sister seems to be the first in the deadly mobile chain letter, to solve the mystery.

Could it have something to do with a mute girl, whose abusive mother perished in a hospital fire?

No worse than any other J-horror remake, One Missed Call actually does more justice to its source material than Gore Verbinski’s Ring rehash.

After a laugh-out-loud shock opening and early exposition crammed dialogue, the film settles into the familiar Asian horror groove of buried scandals, spectral visions, race against time deadlines (literally) and gruesome demises.

Rob Daniel