Country: Japan
Genre: Horror
Director: Norio Tsuruta
Year: 2004
Rating: 
TRASH CINEMA HIGHLY RECOMMENDED MOVIE
Premonition is really about the horror of being unable to protect your loved ones.
Hideki (Hiroshi Mikami), along with his wife Ayaka (Noriko Sakai) and his daughter Nana (Maki Horikita) are driving home to Tokyo after being on vacation. The family pulls over the side of the road so that Hideki can use a pay phone. Hideki sees a mysterious fragment of newspaper and reads it. To his puzzlement, it contains an item about a tragedy concerning his family. While he is still absorbing this information, the tragedy occurs.
This long opening scene is rendered extraordinarily well, with one exception, which I’ll get to in a minute. The family is instantly recognizable. Hideki is the distracted workaholic, who nonetheless obviously adores his family. Ayaka gently chides him to stop working and truly be with his family. Somehow, the way she does it doesn’t come across as nagging but as love. Their daughter Nana is a sweet and lovable tyke, not in a movie way, but as if she stepped out of real life. Within a minute, you feel an emotional connection to this family, and since this is a horror movie, you fear for them.
By the time the tragedy occurs, the atmosphere of horror is absolutely brutal and it only becomes heightened and sustained from there. I was almost grateful when a dreadful bit of CGI, supposedly of a shattered windshield, spoiled the illusion so painstakingly established by director Norio Tsuruta and his wonderful actors, taking me out of the movie. The horror was so devastating that it was almost too much to bear.
From there on, the viewer is in the grip of perpetual dread. How does director Norio Tsuruta do it? He employs two main methods. Whenever possible, he relies on naturalism. The performances are uniformly realistic, the lighting is completely non-sensationalistic, and the art direction is elegant but evokes quotidian reality. When something supernatural happens, it’s completely believable. The other way Tsuruta maintains an atmosphere of dread is by his camera moves which are always stealthy, slow, and deliberate, giving his narrative a sense of inevitability.
The acting is fantastic, especially the leads. The filmmakers were lucky to get actor Hiroshi Mikami. He effortlessly evokes horror and stress without seeming to do much of anything. When he occasionally relaxes, the contrast is startling. In one scene, in which he completely freaks out, most actors would make all of the hyperventilating and screaming seem theatrical. With Mikami, it seems completely natural, which makes it all the more disturbing.
I should point out that the script by Noboru Takagi steers clear of empty histrionics, imbuing the relationships with admirable veracity.
Alright, but you probably want to know, is this one of those Japanese horror movies that make absolutely no sense and is basically an exercise in style? Not at all.
The storytelling foundation of Premonition is the concept of the Akashic Record, which has a long history, which you can look up on Wikipedia. The Akashic Record is said to be a place in the cosmos that has a record of everything that has ever happened and everything that will ever happen, kind of like God’s filing system. Certain people, either because of natural ability, or because they happen to be in a unique moment of stress, can obtain access to the Akashic Record. That is what makes clairvoyance, and the Newspaper Of Death in the movie, possible.
In Premonition, one of the consequences of accessing the Akashic Record, and attempting to do so subsequently, is that the Akashic Record turns around and starts accessing you, causing you to spit out premonitions.
Because of the tragedy that occurred in the opening moments of Premonition, Hideki becomes obsessed with the idea of preventing the tragedies he’s foreseeing. If all possible events are written in the cosmos, is it possible to change the future? That’s what Hideki is determined to find out, even if it kills him.
Premonition is the rarest of films, a horror movie which derives it’s power from relationships and ideas rather than images and shock tactics. It horrified and moved me. If it weren’t for that one phony bit of CGI I alluded to earlier, Premonition would be an Essential flick.
Note: There is actually a fair amount of CGI and visual trickery in the movie that works quite well. It’s a shame that the filmmakers couldn’t spot the one bit of CGI that almost singlehandedly spoiled their opening sequence.