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As an aspiring filmmaker who advocates originality, I shuddered at the thought of seeing Shutter—especially after realizing that Thailand conceived of it first. Where producers got the whole idea of Americanizing every foreign film known to the U.N. is way beyond me. Sure, it’s true that there’s nothing new under the sun, but there’s a thin line between that age-old adage and plain old plagiarism.
Setting that aside, though, I was slightly more intrigued to see Shutter than any of the other Asian remakes. From what I gathered through the trailer, it appeared to be heavily influenced by one of my favorite video games, Fatal Frame. Instead, Shutter seemed to be lost in its own darkroom, leaving it underdeveloped and suffering from the unfortunate mixture of a mediocre cast and a second-rate script (proving that recycling isn’t always a good thing).
Storywise, there isn’t much here that goes outside the box, but that comes with the territory. It starts with Benjamin and Jane Shaw (Joshua Jackson and Rachel Taylor), a man and woman who’ve recently tied the knot and are spending their honeymoon in Japan (where, coincidentally, Benjamin’s job as a photographer beckons). While there, Jane, with Benjamin in tow, swerves off course, thinking she hit a girl in the road. At first, Jane thinks the girl’s spirit is following her, but after being left at home alone long enough to conduct her own independent studies of Photography 101, she begins to realize that perhaps the girl is actually after her mysterious husband instead.
The casting of Naomi Watts look-alike Taylor and an actor overshadowed by Dawson’s Creek doesn’t exactly help Shutter out in the scare department—because there’s only so many times that one can take the deer-in-headlights look. The monotonous soundtrack doesn’t help to create shock and awe, either. The ironic use of Ringo Starr’s “Photograph” would’ve been better than the chosen soundtrack, which drudges on as annoyingly as some Randy Newman song.
But Shutter’s deficiency of actual horror is due not only to the fact that audiences have grown tired of Asian remakes—but it’s also because we’ve grown to know better. For a movie that should pride itself on the art of photography, Shutter hardly offers anything that’s worth looking at. Maybe if its pictures actually said a thousand words and went beyond the colors of the grayscale, then the “surprises” may have actually been just that.
After growing tired of the movie, I chose to imagine different scenarios that encompass the plot more effectively—my favorite of which is an episode of The Office (my inspiration coming once I saw Pam’s ex-fiancé, Roy, show up as Jackson’s friend, Bruno). Wouldn’t it be great to see Michael Scott and Dwight Schrute creating their own version of Ghost Hunters? I can only imagine that it would be much more entertaining than this second-rate Asian remake.
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