One Missed Call

Casts : Kô Shibasaki, Shin'ichi Tsutsumi, Kazue Fukiishi

Yumi Nakamura (Kou Shivasaki) is a pretty teenager whose university life has to do more with her friends than with studying psychology. One of the few lessons she attends to is children’s psychology, but she’s distracted anyway. It’s as though she’s getting a bad feeling about something to happen in the near future.

At a dinner with her friends, everybody exchanges phone numbers. When Yumi and her friend Yoko Okazaki (Anna Nagata) go to the look, Yoko receives a strange missed call. It’s from her own mobile phone. When she hears voicemail, she can hear her own voice saying “It’s beginning to rain”, and then screaming in pain. More mysteriously even, the message’s date is the date after tomorrow. They disregard it, but Yoko dies at that exact moment of the call. She was speaking with Yumi on the phone, and the last things that Yimi can hear are ” “It’s beginning to rain” and then the scream.

The following day, Yumi overhears a group of students talking about an urban legend about people receive phone calls with date and time of their death in the near future. Yumi seeks out Kioto’s boyfriend Kenji Kawai (Atsushi Ida), who also received a call, and witnesses his death. He had believed her on the last moment, but an invisible energy pulls him into the lift shaft.

When her roommate Natsumi Konishi (Kazue Fukiishi) receives a call, Yoko befriends Hiroshi Yamashita (Shin’ichi Tsutsumi), who tells her that his sister Ritsuko Yamashita (Azusa) was the first victim of the phone call. While in the hospital, Yumi hears an asthma pump and recalls that she heard the same noise when Kenji died. They decide to investigate victims of asthma in the hospital and find the name of Marie Mizunuma (Mariko Tsutsui) and her children Mimiko and Nanako. Both are thought to have been brutalised by her mother, who suffered from Muchhäusen Syndrome, an illness which makes parents injure their children in order to save them right away. Parents who suffer this syndrome seek prise and attention from other adults and they want to be considered as good care-providers. They search the family together trying to save Natsumi from her fate.

A para-normal journalist contacts Natsumi. He finally convinces the terrified teenager to get an exorcism in live TV. Natsumi agrees. However, the tv programme goes terribly awry. Although people can’t see it with their eyes, screen monitors show a womanly shape crawling horizontally from one of the walls. Natsumi has a deeply painful death, all the bones in her body being twisted. At the same time a voice tells her “Don’t worry,we’ll take you to hospital.” Natusumi dies, and there is a red sweet on her mouth.

Yumi is the next one to receive the call. They think it’s Marie’s ghost, trying to get more attention.

Yumi goes to the old hospital. The presence of the ghost hauts her there, showing her dead fetoes in crystal jars. Yumi finds Marie’s burnt-to-deat body, holding a mobile phone. The corpse attacks her. Hiroshi tries to save her, but he’s thrown out of the room. The corpse won’t hurt Yumi when she repents from some little fault.

Hiroshi investigates further, and they find out that Marie didn’t her her children. It’s Mimiko who used to hurt Nanako on purpose. After hurting Nanako, Mimiko always gave her her favourite sweet, so that Nanako doesn’t betray her. When Marie finds it out, she takes Nanako to hospital, leaving Mimiko all by herself in spite of suffering an asthma attack at that moment. Mimiko dies. He runs to warn Yumi. She’s at her flat, taking a shower. She doesn’t realise that clocks are turning anti-clockwise so that she’ll be killed at the time set by Mimiko’s ghost.

My interpretation of the ending is that Mimiko has killed Yumi. Disguised as Yumi, Mimiko’s ghost stabs Hiroshi once. He’s taken to hospital. Still on the form of Yumi, Mimiko french-kisses him and puts a sweet on his mouth. But she doesn’t kill him. -Somebody please correct me is there is another interpretation.