Premonition is one of those Japanese horror movies that focuses more on being creepy than terrifying. And outside of one guffaw-inducing moment, it mainly succeeds.
The story starts with a Japanese family driving home. Mom Akaya (Noriko Sakai) is sweetly singing with little daughter Nana (Hana Inoue) while workaholic dad Hideki (Hiroshi Mikami) is typing away on his computer, finishing up some work for the office. Hideki's laptop loses its internet connection, so they stop at a phone booth. Apparently, pay phones in Japan have internet uplinks. Anyway, while Hideki emails his report back to the office, Akaya and Nana remain in the car parked on the roadside. While in the phone booth, Hideki notices a ragged scrap of newspaper in which he finds a story about his daughter being killed in a roadside accident. He freaks out as Akaya leaves the car and comes to his side at which point a truck plows into the car and kills Nana.
Flash forward a few years and Hideki and Akaya are divorced. He's a burned out high school teacher living in a crappy apartment. She's a university researcher studying psychic phenomenon, particularly a professor who can make images appear in instant photographs. Akaya's studies bring her to the work of Rei Kigata (Kei Yamamoto), who wrote about something called "The Newspaper of Terror". He describes people who claimed to receive news reports about tragedies before they occur. Meanwhile, Hideki starts to see more ragged newspapers and other signs of future disasters. When he learns one of his students is destined to die and he fails to save her, Hideki and Akaya are reunited in an effort to understand what's happened to them and why their daughter had to die.
Though it features very little violence or gore, Premonition does contain a decent amount of scares. Like similar Japanese films, it concentrates on creating a mood of fear and uncertainty, eschewing the adrenaline-pumping plot dynamics of American horror flicks. This is the sort of film where the audience repeatedly sees the characters react to something and then the camera moves and the audience sees what they're reacting to. That storytelling distance produces more of an intellectual anxiety, instead of a visceral reaction.
After building up the mystery of "The Newspaper of Terror", the story doesn't really pay it off. No questions are answered by the ending the movie offers up, which deal with more of an existential horror that doesn't quite seem like it fits the first three-quarters of the film. It's effective on its own, but I'm not sure it dramatically or thematically flows from what comes before it. It's like taking the conclusion of a good episode of The Twilight Zone and stapling it onto a different but vaguely similar episode of The Outer Limits.
Outside of a single scene that is unintentionally hilarious, the acting and direction of Premonition are very nice. That one scene, though, is laugh-out-loud funny. It involves Japanese funeral rites, so the humor may be the byproduct of cultural differences, but I almost couldn't stop laughing when it happened.
As long as you're prepared to accept an ending that fails to resolve any of the issues raised by its story, Premonition is worth seeing if only for the most terrifying scrap of newsprint in cinematic history.
The story starts with a Japanese family driving home. Mom Akaya (Noriko Sakai) is sweetly singing with little daughter Nana (Hana Inoue) while workaholic dad Hideki (Hiroshi Mikami) is typing away on his computer, finishing up some work for the office. Hideki's laptop loses its internet connection, so they stop at a phone booth. Apparently, pay phones in Japan have internet uplinks. Anyway, while Hideki emails his report back to the office, Akaya and Nana remain in the car parked on the roadside. While in the phone booth, Hideki notices a ragged scrap of newspaper in which he finds a story about his daughter being killed in a roadside accident. He freaks out as Akaya leaves the car and comes to his side at which point a truck plows into the car and kills Nana.
Flash forward a few years and Hideki and Akaya are divorced. He's a burned out high school teacher living in a crappy apartment. She's a university researcher studying psychic phenomenon, particularly a professor who can make images appear in instant photographs. Akaya's studies bring her to the work of Rei Kigata (Kei Yamamoto), who wrote about something called "The Newspaper of Terror". He describes people who claimed to receive news reports about tragedies before they occur. Meanwhile, Hideki starts to see more ragged newspapers and other signs of future disasters. When he learns one of his students is destined to die and he fails to save her, Hideki and Akaya are reunited in an effort to understand what's happened to them and why their daughter had to die.
Though it features very little violence or gore, Premonition does contain a decent amount of scares. Like similar Japanese films, it concentrates on creating a mood of fear and uncertainty, eschewing the adrenaline-pumping plot dynamics of American horror flicks. This is the sort of film where the audience repeatedly sees the characters react to something and then the camera moves and the audience sees what they're reacting to. That storytelling distance produces more of an intellectual anxiety, instead of a visceral reaction.
After building up the mystery of "The Newspaper of Terror", the story doesn't really pay it off. No questions are answered by the ending the movie offers up, which deal with more of an existential horror that doesn't quite seem like it fits the first three-quarters of the film. It's effective on its own, but I'm not sure it dramatically or thematically flows from what comes before it. It's like taking the conclusion of a good episode of The Twilight Zone and stapling it onto a different but vaguely similar episode of The Outer Limits.
Outside of a single scene that is unintentionally hilarious, the acting and direction of Premonition are very nice. That one scene, though, is laugh-out-loud funny. It involves Japanese funeral rites, so the humor may be the byproduct of cultural differences, but I almost couldn't stop laughing when it happened.
As long as you're prepared to accept an ending that fails to resolve any of the issues raised by its story, Premonition is worth seeing if only for the most terrifying scrap of newsprint in cinematic history.