In the Flesh: Shutter

Banjong Pisanthanakun and Parkpoom Wongpoom’s Shutter is riffing pretty obviously on Ringu, Ju-On: The Grudge, and other seminal East Asian horror from around the turn of the millennium, borrowing their long-haired, rotten-skinned ghost maidens for its own lonely specter, Natre (Achita Sikamana) or “Nets” as it is frequently transliterated. Rather than locating its central trauma in the home and/or childhood, though, Shutter probes at the unmoored lives of teen and twenty-something students coming to grips with their adult personalities. Combined with the clever ways in which the film makes use of the mechanical action of cameras to heighten suspense and the creativity it displays with its spectral antagonist’s physicality, Pisanthanakun and Wongpoom manage to carve out their own niche within the genre.

Shutter makes extensive use of “spirit photos”, a common tabloid magazine tactic by which visual distortions are produced, exaggerated, or exploited in photographs to suggest the presence of a paranormal entity. In several sequences a character uses Polaroid photography in an attempt to track Nets’s passage through a room or apartment, a hair-raising conceit which forces the audience to wait breathlessly between the distinctive pop and whir of the camera ejecting each picture to see where danger might lurk. Nets herself terrifies not with screams or twitchy, sped-up movement but by the simple fact of her presence, a dogged reminder of protagonist Tun’s (Ananda Everingham) utter lack of character. Everingham, tall and pop-star beautiful, does a first rate job of slowly revealing his repellent qualities without damaging the credibility of his appeal. He pretends with wriggling, avoidant emotional honesty at classist passivity while harboring much darker secrets.

Like Ringu, Shutter is brutally unsentimental about the idea of closure. The funeral Tun commissions for Nets resolves nothing. The cremation of her ghoulishly preserved body does not deter her haunting. As she was denied any possibility of closure in life by Tun and his friends, treated in every way as something subhuman and unworthy of acknowledgement, so too does her manifestation push Tun inevitably toward a lifetime pressed cheek to cheek with his own hateful behavior, unmoving and helpless. The grim catharsis of his broken shell sitting slumped in its hospital bed is nearly as satisfying as the final act revelation of his mysterious neck pain’s origin, a moment of deliciously skin-crawling realization. His punishment is not death, but the torture of the same intimacy he cruelly denied Nets when she was alive.