Despite the torrent of music, clothing, movies, slang, and customs pouring out from our nation and overwhelming the rest of the world, at least one country occasionally reverses the flow, contributing substantially to American popular culture in our time. Along with their special kind of graphic novels and their peculiar style of animation, the Japanese also produce some distinctive horror films, which now turn up regularly on late-night cable television and, in the form of American remakes, imitations, and sequels, flicker on the grand screens of the multiplexes. "The Ring," "The Grudge,"
"The Eye," and "Dark Water," for example, have found large and appreciative audiences and have even carved out a special niche in the vast, dark, echoing halls of fright.

The latest Western version of a Japanese picture, "Shutter," mixes some elements of both cultures and, like any work in a populous genre, necessarily depends upon a rich history of previous examples. Although it features American actors playing American characters, its story takes place almost entirely in Japan, where in fact a mingling of the two national traditions and attitudes contributes to both action and meaning.

Reversing the normal course of bourgeois domestic narratives, which generally end happily in a wedding, this one begins with one, then proceeds through a honeymoon, a series of catastrophes, and an eventual dissolution, itself a reversal of those horror flicks that usually conclude with some measure of triumph over whatever menace lurks Out There. The central characters, newlyweds Benjamin and Jane Shaw (Joshua Jackson and Rachael Taylor), travel to Japan, where Ben, a photographer, has been commissioned to shoot pictures for a big publicity campaign. Ben has worked there before with two friends in advertising, who provide a well equipped studio and a spacious apartment for the couple, eager to enjoy their holiday together.

Naturally, since they inhabit a horror film, disaster strikes, when Jane, driving on a snowy night through a dark forest, runs over a young girl who suddenly appears in the middle of the road. When the police arrive, they can find no trace of the victim, a mystery that haunts Jane for the rest of the movie. The haunting turns literal when vague, cloudy shapes, streaks of light, appear in the photographs she and Ben take of each other and even in the pictures from his advertising shoot.

In some of the pictures, the spectral images solidify into the figure of the girl, whom Jane keeps glimpsing out of the corner of her eye. She visits the office of a magazine devoted to "spirit photographs," where the editor tells her that sometimes the dead, filled with passionate feelings of love or anger or hatred, can return in the form of a kind of ectoplasm, showing up in pictures.

As the plot progresses in its rather stolid, linear fashion, the movie displays the familiar pattern of most of its kind, with an increasing number of shocks and frights, often with the usual false alarms followed by real alarms. The silent wraith in the background of the photos becomes a more active threat, appearing bodily in some scenes, and ultimately causing the deaths of Ben's friends and colleagues. Though terrified of the apparition, Jane studies the photographs in order to understand its source, to discover the necessary logic of the horror, which leads to a revelation more shocking than the specter itself.

Japanese horror flicks, which tend to concentrate on the return of some silent, threatening victim from the past who lurks in the background of the action, remind their characters of some previous misdeed that demands some form of reparation or revenge. In "Shutter" the notion that the photograph itself freezes a moment of time combines with that theme, so that the picture embodies past and present, acting as an accusatory device.

The pictures Jane examines reveal a past that ultimately destroys her marriage and leaves her husband with an inescapable and distressingly literal burden of memory and guilt. In keeping with its source in Japanese culture and in contrast to its American context, "Shutter" presents a dark, troubling solution to its mystery, with no happy conclusion, no victory, but simply a horror that will never end. 

Shutter

(PG-13), directed by Masayuki Ochia.

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