Crew
Director – Manabu Aso, Screenplay – Minako Daira & Jiro Shin, Producer – Joon-hwan Choi, Photography – Kazushige Tanaka. Production Company – Kadokawa Pictures/CJ Entertainment.
Cast
Meisa Kuroki (Emily Kusama), Maki Horikita (Asuka Matsuda), Geun-seok Jang (An Jinu), Erika Asakura (Minori Yazawa), Yu Kamiwaki (Mari), Rie Tsuneyoshi (Natsuko), Arisa Naito (Yuki), Kazuma Yamane (Teruya Mikami), Miho Amakawa (Azusa Kusuki), Itsuji Itao (Mr Kibe)
Plot
A class of teenagers from Japan go on a field trip to South Korea. They then begin to receive a series of messages on their phones showing pictures of their own deaths and telling them to forward the message or die. When they fail to do so, they end up being killed. The others realise that the messages are coming from Asuka Matsuda, a girl that all of them bullied and tormented, driving her to attempt suicide. She is now reaching out to them from where she lies in hospital in a coma to exact a curse.
One Missed Call (2003) was one of the more successful entries in the wave of Japanese ghost stories that came out following Ring (1998) and Ju-on: The Grudge (2002). It essentially translated the idea of Ring’s viral curse from a tv broadcast to one that was spread by cellphone. It was successful enough that it spawned two sequels with One Missed Call 2 (2005) and One Missed Call: Final here, as well as a ten episode tv series One Missed Call (2005). These were followed by a desultory English-language remake One Missed Call (2008), the mark of success for any of the films that came out during the Asian Horror fad.
One Missed Call: Final is a Japanese-South Korean co-production. To such extent, it has a plot that transports a classroom of Japanese schoolkids to Korea for the duration, while a Korean male lead (Geun-seok Jang) is wound into the plot. The plot returns more to the premise of cursed viral phone calls that we had in the first film but was abandoned by the second. If anything, the film now resembles something of Final Destination (2000) than it does a copy of Ring.
Unfortunately, the film dies a death of terminal boredom. It has been pitched to a teen audience, meaning that spookiness of the Ring or Ju-on/The Grudge films, or even the first One Missed Call, has been considerably watered down. The deaths of the various students are tepid, while there is nothing about any of them that is memorable.
The strangest aspect of the film is the explanation of what is going on. There is the standard Supernatural Retribution plot of one of these films – a bullied tormented/individual who is exacting revenge from beyond the grave against anybody connected. In this case, it is a schoolgirl who we see being bullied in the opening scenes who committed suicide – again standard stuff for the genre. Towards the end, we learn that she survived her attempt to commit suicide and wreaks retribution while lying in a coma in hospital. However, this has become a bizarre case of Split Personality where one part of her is doing the tormenting and heroine Meisa Kuroki is able to appeal to the decent self that lies unconscious. Meisa’s friends are then able to defeat the evil half by getting everybody they know to conduct a DDOS attack on her computer!
One Missed Call: Final was the second feature film from director Manabu Aso has mostly worked in Japanese tv. Elsewhere he has made crime thrillers such as At the End of the Century (2000), Long Long Murder (2007) and Kuroha: The Fate of a Woman (2015).
Trailer here