Spirits

The trailers for this movie made it look pretty good, but it turned out to be not the best movie. It delivers the scares, but there are too many 'false alarms'. A lot of the love stuff in the beginning could've been left out. The real horror starts a little too late, and basically is pretty corny. Most of the acting is pretty bad, and some of the dialogue seems to be totally improvised. This is one Japanese horror remake that shouldn't have been made at all in my opinion. It has a pretty bad plot that takes a long time to unfold and, at times, is rather boring. Warning - do not be fooled, for this is one movie that blows! If you want to see a movie, just avoid this, and see something else instead. Trust me.

After seeing this movie, I was shocked by the comments. The movie wasn't that bad at all.

In the beginning I wasn't sure what to think. It was rather scary, and the plot itself made my question whether I saw this movie or not already. It reminded me of similar movies like the grudge.

But let's face it, the end was surprising and not in any way predictable.

I like the movie. I'll see it again someday.

I gave it a six because it was very entertaining, surprising, but it wont go into history as a masterpiece.

See this movie if you want to enjoy yourself, be scared, be excited and you wont regret it.

this movie was mostly boring,with no real scares.plus this genre(remakes of Japanese movies)is getting to be old hat,at least in my mind.i also didn't think the actors put forth a lot of effort.i will admit the ending was a bit creepy,but a horror movie with a creepy ending,does not a complete horror movie make.the rest of the movie was lifeless and bland.having interesting characters with more than one dimension always helps.too bad this movie didn't have them.the storyline isn't too deep,either.i won't say this is the most boring movie i have ever seen,or the worst.it's just that it does nothing to distinguish itself from the rest of the pack.for me,Shutter is a 4/10

Take it as it is. A derivative, leaden, mind-numbingly simplified remake of a superior original. That's not to say that it's genuinely decent on its own merits if you've not already seen 2004's seminal Thai-horror "Shutter" that reignited that country's interest in producing slow burning, luxuriously made horror films. Interestingly, and perhaps even fittingly, the Hollywood machine that devours and regurgitates the recent slate of J-Horror films has turned its sights on "Shutter", which arguably finds its core roots in Japan's horror conventions in its vengeful, waifish ghost girl tormenting the living by manifesting through various electronic mediums. So what Masayuki Ochiai's adaptation essentially becomes is a carbon copy of copy.

American photographer Ben Shaw (Joshua Jackson) and his blonde schoolteacher bride Jane (Rachael Taylor) go straight from nuptials to a working honeymoon in Japan, natch, because America just isn't as scary to Americans as Asia is. Before heading off to Ben's lucrative assignment in Tokyo, the newly minted couple heads to a remote countryside inn when a brief accident derails Jane's constitution and compels her to seek out answers led by a phantasmal presence in photographs and a newly discovered knowledge of spirit photography.

Unremarkably, Luke Dawson's screenplay omits and appends details to its basic premise. The original uses the stark disassociation of city living to intensify the eeriness of isolation, and the idea that we never really see what we think we know. Dawson's script transplants the couple to a different country, ramping up the cultural alienation and exoticism of another culture. It's not dissimilar to what we've already seen in "The Grudge" remakes.

Even as Ochiai's direction is comparatively surefooted and patient with the camera choosing to hang on to a scene instead of ludicrously harping on jump-cuts and eyeball-rattling shots that bounce off the wall, the film feels unambitiously stale. "Shutter" goes through the motions of dourly checking off look-behind-you set pieces and reflections on windows. The plotting and performances are so apparent; you'd find yourself a couple of steps ahead of the film's central faux-mystery. While the bizarre symbiotic relationship audiences have with particularly mediocre remakes of Asian horror films should still live on after this, what remains most terrifying is how textbook simple and undemanding the film-making has become for films of its ilk.

This was a surprisingly good, old fashioned ghost story.

I haven't seen the original and I'm not a fanboy, so I didn't have any axes to grind going in. The cast is very good if somewhat underutilized, the photography and musical scoring are excellent, and there's a plot twist that caught me completely by surprise.

Watching the previews you'd think this was the one millionth Asian horror with a vengeful female spirit who has long black hair and dark circles under her eyes. There's more than that going on here.

And, without giving any plot points away, the final shot of the film is going to stay with me for a long, long time.

Sure, this isn't the most original piece of work ever. It's part of a long tradition of ghost stories. But the makers had the sense to keep it to 85 minutes so it's over before you really begin to think how familiar some of the material is.