Newlyweds Benjamin (Joshua Jackson) and Jane (Rachael Taylor) Shaw have decided to forgo a traditional honeymoon so the fresh-face husband can immediately start work in Japan working for a prestigious international advertising conglomerate. He’s a photographer, and while his wife isn’t exactly sure she wants to spend two years living abroad she’s not about to stand in the way of her new beau’s well-paying career.

All is not picture perfect for Rachael Taylor and Joshua Jackson in 20th Century Fox's Shutter

But things do not go smoothly, especially after Jane thinks she hit a woman with her car, and even though no body is found the newlywed can’t shake the feeling something dangerously ominous is about to happen. Soon ghostly aspirations start appearing in all of her and Benjamin’s photographs, a pale young Japanese woman apparently stalking them in wintry wisps of white in each and every frame. She wants something from the couple, Jane just knows it, and the more she digs into the past to discover who this woman is the more she unvcovers a secret of her husband’s that just might put both of them in mortal danger.

Just because it’s set in Japan, is directed by noted Japanese director Masayuki Ochiai (Infection) and is produced by prolific Japanese producer Taka Ichise (The Grudge) doesn’t mean Shutter is another Japanese remake along the lines of The Ring, Pulse or One Missed Call. It is, in fact, a remake of a 2000 Thai thriller, so don’t think for an instant this one follows any of the usual templates.

Oh who am I kidding. Shutter follows all of the usual templates, every single one of them, and anyone expecting a single thing they haven’t seen before definitely has another thing coming to them. Everything here from the mysterious feminine poltergeist, to the shocking images flashing in a speeding subway train’s windows, to the supposedly jaw-droppingly twisted climax is something we have seen so many times before it stopped being scary ages ago.

In all fairness, Ochiai stages a couple of nice moments, not the least of which is a freakishly unsettling sequence in a pitch-black photo studio, the blinding white flash of a photography strobe light bouncing flashes of spine-tingling terror all across the theater screen. An opening car crash is also handled extremely well, while the majority of the pointless exposition is thankfully kept to a bare minimum allowing the film to move at a brisker pace than usually is the case for these types of thrillers.

But that’s about it for kudos. While the film is never as agonizingly terrible as One Missed Call or Ring Two, it’s nothing a person is going to remember for very long after leaving the multiplex. Luke Dawson’s screenplay isn’t bad, it’s just pointlessly derivative, while the majority of the scares are telegraphed from so far away a person could be forgiven if all the emotion they could muster to get through them all were a couple of well placed yawns. 

The movie does prove two things. The first is that Taylor might just be worth keeping an eye on, the young Transformers actress doing far more for the feature than it even remotely does for her. The other is that, for all is “Dawson’s Creek” sexiness (which he admittedly still has), Jackson ain’t much on an actor, looking so out of his element for much of the second half I couldn’t tell if the look on his face was feigned terror or a sudden need to go use the bathroom. Not that it really matters, Shutter one case where the picture is worth two words, skip it, not the proverbial thousand.

Film Rating: êê (out of 4)

Additional Links:

-  Shutter Theatrical Trailer