No, the deluge of Asian fright films remade in Hollywood hasn’t dried up yet. Not by the evidence of “Shutter,” produced by people behind the American versions of “The Grudge” and “The Ring” and itself a remake of the 2004 Thai film “Shutter.” Fans of J-horror (for Japan, where the genre was born; its conventions have since spread to South Korea and Thailand) will find “Shutter” familiar; others may just doze.
As is often the case in these movies, electronics is the medium through which the afterlife contacts the living. In “One Missed Call,” cellphones impart fatal portents; in “The Ring,” it’s videotape. Here it’s photographs, lots of photographs, from a disposable camera, a Pentax, a Polaroid, any brand name you can flash on the screen.
Appearing in the snapshots is a wraith, that of a woman (the mesmerizing Megumi Okina) whom a newlywed Brooklyn couple — Jane (Rachael Taylor) and Ben (Joshua Jackson), a commercial photographer, on a working vacation in Japan — have apparently run over by accident. She vanishes but later dogs their steps in Tokyo and New York, sometimes in window reflections but mostly as a ghostly smudge in Ben’s pictures. Jane is determined to learn her identity; Ben is in no hurry, for good reason.
The director, Masayuki Ochiai, conjures textbook J-horror miasma: clammy clinical interiors; overcast skies; diffuse cityscapes. He also gives Alfred Hitchcock a nod, with a sequence nakedly stolen from “Psycho,” and draws unease from Jane’s disorientation in a foreign city. Tokyo, in fact, may be the movie’s most fascinating player.
But the mandatory bump-offs — a gouging through a viewfinder, a compelled suicide — lack novelty. Only a spectral smooch, in which a serpentlike tongue chokes Mr. Jackson, prompts a lasting chill. That is one nasty mouthful.
“Shutter” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Corpses, flies, cameras.
