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Day 13 of Calloween Movie Month
Content warnings: child abuse, gore, suicide, elderly death, child death, body horror, lots of gross bone crunch noises
Recommended?: Yes
Spoilers and discussion of many of the mentioned topics below. You have been warned.
Candy has never been so scary.
One Missed Call is a film about Yumi Nakamura coping with the reality that the people around her are being caught in a curse in which they get phone calls from their future selves foreshadowing their gruesome deaths. She teams up with a recently fired funeral director, Yamashita, to get to the bottom of it.
Hearing the premise it's easy to call it a copycat of Ringu and hand-wave it away, but I believe the deeply personal story from the twisted mind of Takashi Miike does a lot to set itself apart from it's contemporaries.
I don't think I've been nearly this frightened since I watched one of his other films, Audition. While the horror in both films are derived from very different places, both show he has a grasp on the genre like few others do.
The creeping dread that rackets itself up to wordless terror over and over again. The knowledge of this curse and the things that are causing it but not having the ability to stop it, even after being warned. Like a morbid stageplay with unwilling actors giving the best performance of their lives. Everything and everyone stays on script.
The weaponizing of the natural paranoia human beings have. Shots framed through closet doors and the end of a long hallway. Close zooms with no reason, leaving you to wonder who, or what, is there. Quiet shots of spirits lurking close by or walking close behind the characters without them knowing. All working to slowly burn itself into you, like the sun through a spyglass.
Early on in the film, Yumi and her friend attend a lecture regarding the psychology of child abuse, both of the abusers and their victims. The idea is brought forth that the trauma abuse may turn people into abusers when they have the power to do so, and over the course of the film we see this being played out over and over again.
The only way to escape this curse, not the one of a haunted cellphone, but the real life curse of abuse and PTSD is to both be willing to break the cycle and be willing to let things go. You cannot be trapped in your own mind with the ghosts of the people you could have been and used to be forever. You must let your own spirits pass on before you're able to live a healthy, full life.
Yumi's trauma is paralyzing to her. It haunts her every moment of her life. Every knock on the door reminds her of the sight of her grandmother's hanging corpse through the view of a peephole, every flick of a lighter reminds her of the never healing cigarette burns on her body. This unwillingness, or inability, whichever you may think, is what leads to her inevitable death at the hands of a kid much like her. She broke the cycle, not letting her fear of her mother define her, but she wasn't able to get out of the prison in her mind.
The main malicious spirit in this film is of a girl, Mimiko, who abused her younger sister for her mother's, and maybe a doctor's, attention. She wouldn't break the cycle. Either she didn't want to or she was too young to know how. Her mother refused to fix her mistakes, blamed it all on her child, and then left her to die. Both the villains in each other's story, leaving the youngest between them by herself in an unforgiving world.
Mimiko uses Yumi's trauma to lure her to her death, and Yamashita's trauma to lure him into torture. Yamashita blames himself for his sister's death, and now feels a need to protect anyone and everyone around him. By not forgiving himself for something that he was never to blame for in the first place, he doesn't fight back against Mimiko. He believes he deserves his fate, to fill the same role as Mimiko's sister once did. So he accepts it, doomed to a life of pain and false comfort and sickly sweet hard candy.
Abuse is ruination and trauma is decay. Like clumps of gooey, decomposed skin sloughing off the face of your mother's corpse. Blue lips of a child begging for air. Shreds of a torn polaroid picture.
If you don't let it die in peace, it'll make sure to take you with it.
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