Honeybeads Blog

I saw a trailer for this on the DVD for Infection and it looked promising. It is about a man who is cursed with being shown various tragedies that will occur in the very near future via ghostly newspaper clippings. The first revelation costs him the life of his young daughter and the remainder of the movie chronicles his struggle with whether or not to intervene to save the lives of those he is foretold will die.

This is a Japanese film and I expected this to fall in line with the other great Asian horror movies I've been watching lately. That is, full of atmosphere, good scares, and creepy as heck. This is not what I got, but I was nonetheless not dissapointed. This movie has the typical atmosphere - uneasy, uncertainty, and an overall sense of tension throughout. The scares and creepiness, however, are replaced by sadness and fear for the character caught up in a seemingly hopeless plight. The film revolves around tragedy and you really get a sense of the grief that the man feels over the loss of his daughter and with the constant torment of his "premonitions". The movie has the usual Asian horror genre's slow pace and is mainly plot and character focused. The acting is quite good and you become very emotionally attached to the man and his wife as they struggle to find resolution within thier predicament.

Premonition delivers a strong ending, full of tension and emotion. There are few loose ends, though we are never told why this man became a target of the mysterious, ominous newspaper other than that his wife had run accross the story of the original victim of these revelations during her research into the subject of psychic photographic projection.

Brian's Bottom Line: Definitely worth a rental. Much better than similar American cinema like White Noise.