One Missed Call

Review

The basic part of the story deals with cell phone messages from the future that are in the voice of the person who is going to be killed at that time. Various young people die. Yumi is scheduled to be next, but a guy is trying to help her find out what is causing the deaths.

The movie is very good, actually, until the rather confusing ending. It's one of the better movies story-wise that I have seen for a while; it's keeps your attention. It has some gore, but not an excessive amount.

The only problem is the ending. I actually had to check some sites on line to see what other people were saying about the ending. I think “confusing” is pretty much an accurate word to use.

Synopsis

Yumi has a phobia of peepholes.

A woman named Yoko shows up. She has a friend that recently died.

A cell phone rings while they are still in the restroom. It's Yoko's phone, butn ot her ring tone.

She doesn't answer it in time. She checks the message and it's someone screaming. It's her voice from the near future.

Some guy looks at a dead woman's body, and a policeman comes in.

The girl who got the missed call is talking to Yumi and we hear the same sounds that were on the voice message.

The girl turns around and sees something and screams. She's pushed through a fence and falls onto a train. Then we see her severed arm dialing a number on her cell phone.

Yumi talks to some other girls. They tell her that a girl that supposedly drowned had gotten a similar call from ehrself on her cell phone prior to her death.

One girl says who is supposedly killing the girls.

A guy hands her a phone. He had gotten a message, and it's time dated a few minutes in the future. The elevator opens and he doesn't get in, but something happens around his feet and he falls to his death anyhow. He has fallen down the elevator shaft even though he never entered it. Then we see his cell phone dialing a number on its own.

(Now, at his point, if something like this was really going on, wouldn't it be logical to turn your cell phone off, go to the nearest cell phone place and buy a different phone with a different number, and then destroy your old phone? )

Natsumi gets a similar call on her phone. The message is from two days in the future.

Amazing. For once, someone actually does something logical in a horror film.

Afterwards, Natsumi gets ambushed by a reporter.

The reporter gives Natsumi a phone from someone else, and then it starts to ring with the same ring tone as the death messages have.

A guy tells Yumi that the girl who was killed falling on the train somehow made a phone call after her arm was severed. He has Yumi dial the number, but it's no longer working.

The guy's sister had gotten a similar call and had died. He found a piece of candy in her mouth after she had died.

They find out the number was a hospital's emergency number five months previously before the hospital moved.

A TV show plans to cover Natsumi's death.

The noise she had heard was of someone using an inhaler.

Some guy from a morgue has records of bodies sent to them from the hospital. He goes through them on a computer and finds someone who died and had asthma.

He adds that the girl's mother seemed to have disappeared after the girl's death. The other guy calls the number and only gets voice mail.

The guy's sister had worked at this clinic, and the young girl with asthma who died had also been to this clinic. Yumi and the guy find out that the girl's mother may have abused her and her sister (not sexually, but in other ways.) There was no absolute proof, though.

This is what the mother might have had.

The police are not exactly overly enthusiastic about helping.

The TV show with Natsumi goes on as planned.

Natsumi is brought out on stage.

Almost everyone seems to be watching the show, including the police. It's even on the outside of a building. The show even has a countdown clock going.

They bring out an exorcist or something like that.

Suddenly, the death music cell phone tone sounds.

Long hair appears by Natsumi's feet.

The exorcist is blown back through the scenery.

A woman appears, just like the image on her cell phone message. The woman is visible on the camera image, but not just by looking in her direction.

She dies when her head is twisted off her body.

Then Yumi's phone rings. It's the same type of futuristic message.

The guy finds out Yumi's mother had abused her by hitting her, and she still carries the marks. Her mother also burned her with cigarettes and forced her to look through a peephole to see her own grandmother hanging in a room.

They go to find the ten-year-old girl's mother. The building looks like the one from Dark Water, and so does the elevator they use.

Yumi finds a torn-up photo in the young girl's room.

Yumi hears something and sees hands.

The guy goes to talk to the younger sister of the asthmatic girl that had died.

Yumi finds out that the old hospital has never been torn down.

Yumi goes to the old hospital.

She turns the lights on. She can't find the guy who had gone there before her. She also hears a cell phone tone.

It turns out to be an incoming message for her. The lights go out, and something comes down from the ceiling. (The image was so very dark I had to lighten it a lot in order to actually be able to see anything.)

She runs away but backs into the same figure later, then runs away again. (Again, the image was so dark in the film I had to lighten it a lot.)

Two hands begin pushing bottles into the hallway. They appear to contain fetuses.

She gets dragged back into a room. Then the guy finds her.

They try to get out a door but it's chained. A face seems to impact the door.

A cell phone in the room rings and tells Yumi she will die in a certain number of seconds.

In the other room a hand is holding another cell phone. He takes it from the hand. Suddenly both cell phones stop making noise.

The phones countdown proves false. He walks back into the other room and finds a body in a box. (Again, I've lightened the picture).

Yumi looks at the body.

Suddenly the body moves and grabs her. The guy grabs her, then attacks the body with an axe but it does no good. He gets outside of the room, but Yumi runs into some kind of force field.

The guy suddenly hears his dead sister.

Suddenly, the woman has her normal face.

It acts like it's going to strangle Yumi.

Yumi tells it she'll be a good girl and stay there, then hugs the woman.

The guy finally gets into the room and sees Yumi holding the woman.

The police find out the woman had been dead for about six months, and the cell phone she had contained the numbers of the victims.

He finds out the mother didn't hurt the youngest girl, but it was the girl's sister who did.

It turns out it was the asthmatic girl who was hurting the younger sister. The mother takes the younger sister to the hospital after the asthmatic girl had cut hurt, leaving the older sister behind, unable to breathe.

Yumi's clock is going backwards.

It turns out Yumi has company.

He gets to Yumi's apartment and thinks he sees her. The girl stabs him.

In the mirror, he sees the girl is really the young girl and not Yumi.

He wakes up in the hospital. The girl who appears to be Yumi kisses him and puts a piece of candy into his mouth. He eats it and looks up at Yumi who smiles at him.



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