Premonition (2004)

Netflix Synopsis: On a family outing, Hideki Satomi (Hiroshi Mikami) comes across a news clipping containing his young daughter’s obituary; trouble is, the girl isn’t dead. Next thing you know, a freak accident kills her exactly as the article described. Fast-forward three years: When broadsheets again start delivering disastrous future news — from slayings to train wrecks — Hideki finds himself trapped in a living nightmare in this chilling horror flick.

Review: Asian filmmakers, particularly the Japanese, have spent the past decade finding ways of making the most mundane things into objects of horror. Videotapes (”Ringu”), cell phones (”Phone”), first dates (”Audition”) - you name it, they can scare the bejeezus out of you with it.

“Premonition” uses a newspaper. Not just any newspaper, of course, but the Akashic Record … the “newspaper of terror”. While that may sound like something out of an episode of “Aqua Teen Hunger Force”, it does provide quite a few startling moments in this well-made film. A workaholic father finds the newspaper, which has a report about the death of his still-living daughter. She is suddenly killed in a car accident, and her parents spend the rest of the movie attempting to find the source of the mysterious newspaper, with the father trying to change the outcome of the prescient tragedies it reports.

There are a good number of shocking moments, but this film is more similar to the original version of “Dark Water” than anything else, being much more a story of redemption and second chances than a straight horror movie. There are some excellent performances by the lead actors, which you can feel even through the subtitles.

If you enjoy modern Asian horror films, this one, while a bit more subdued than many, is definitely worth a spot in your queue.

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Submitted by: Rich 3/30/07