(2008) You may never answer your cell phone again without trepidation after watching this fright film from director Eric Valette, based on a spooky Japanese movie, Chakushin Ari (written by Mikaku Daira).

In May, a little girl rescued from the flames stares blankly as St Luke's Hospital burns. After receiving a call on her cell phone at home, Shelley Baum, 24, drowns with her cat Luna in the backyard pond; her friend Leann, returning from the funeral, shows up at a party in Beth (Shannyn Sossaman) Raymond's home. Making an unfamiliar ring tone, Leann's cell phone indicates "1 missed call" coming from Shelley's phone with voice mail, dated a day in advance, with Leann's voice and scream.

In the morgue detective Jack Andrews (Edward Burns) views the body of his younger sister Jean, recently found after being dead for a week; inside her mouth he extracts a hard red candy. Beth, a psych major and herself a victim of child abuse, and Leann attend a lecture on the post-traumatic child, whose vulnerabilities may include hallucinations. Leann falls onto train tracks just before she screams into her cell phone to Beth.

"Dead people call and then it's your own voice," the rumor passes, "and you're dead, too." From debris in a freak explosion at a construction site across the street, Leann and Beth's friend Brian (they all share each other's cell phone numbers), dies in front of Beth after telling her - "If you don't think about it, it can't hurt you" - about the voice mail on his cell phone from Leann with his own voice. Both corpses expel a red candy.

Coincidences? At the police station when another detective takes no interest in Beth's worries, Jack expresses sympathy and concern, recognizing a possible connection with his sister's death. Another girlfriend Taylor Anthony receives a voice mail posted two days in advance with her own voice: "This can't be happening." Both girls remove the batteries from their phones; Taylor's still produces the eerie ring tone. They smash the phone.

A TV producer and televangelist for a reality show, American Miracles, offers to exorcise Taylor's "evil influences." Spiritual disturbances, he explains on the program, can travel through cell phones.

Being a detective, Jack discovers that his sister received a call from Marie Layton (whom he and Beth will suspect of being an abusive mother to her daughter Ellie who died from an asthma attack just before the fire); when no one answers at her apartment, he and Beth surreptitiously enter, finding strange dolls, a centipede in a jar, DVDs from a mini-cam, and an inhaler (which Beth recognizes as making a sound she'd heard before each of her friends died).

On Friday Beth's cell phone produces the distinctive ring tone with a voice mail - "Please tell me why" - for Saturday, June 17th, 7:55 p.m. (Would you still have a cell phone if all of this had happened to you? I don't own one.)

The little girl from the opening scene is Laurel Layton, Ellie's younger sister; in the care of social services, Laurel has remained mute since the blaze. Laurel's teddy bear makes the same sound as the ring tones; with time running out, Beth has reason to believe Marie may have been in the hospital and not found, leaving her spirit to haunt. Of course, Beth enters the building alone … making her way down dark corridors … with askew camera angles on the stairs … dripping water … shapes flitting in the distance … locked doors to prevent her escape … to make it scary. But one climax isn't enough. In the end the source of the evil spirit, which persists, is left unexplained.

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Copyright © 2008 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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