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| From https://upload.wikimedia.org/ wikipedia/en/f/f1/Premonition.jpg |
Director: Norio Tsuruta
Screenplay: Norio Tsuruta and Noboru
Takgi
Cast: Hiroshi Mikami (as Hideki
Satomi); Noriko Sakai (as Ayaka Satomi); Hana Inoue (as Nana Satomi); Maki
Horikita (as Sayuri Wakakubo); Mayumi Ono (as Misato Miyamoto)
A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #62
Fate and the idea that life could
be dictated by a planned out will is a powerful concept that crops up constantly
in storytelling, an attempt to explain the inexplicable and tragic in real
life, but also a potential fear inducing notion that one has no control in how
their life passes on. We've passed from mythology where fate played an
important part for, say, ancient Greek heroes but with fortune telling and
other areas of spiritualism the idea of predicting the future is still
tantalising for many. Premonition,
based on a manga by Jiro Tsunoda,
plays with a potent idea of how by newspapers, which sudden appear and spread
news of tragedies and deaths before they happen, premonitions can be a curse to
have. When one older male scholar Hideki Satomi (Hiroshi Mikami), finds one in a lay-by telephone booth predicting
his daughter's death, and for such a tragedy to happen, it starts events years
after where he starts to be plagued by newspaper prophecies about deaths and
murders he cannot stop. It's absolutely riveting as an idea, as he tries to
fight against it with his ex-wife Ayaka (Noriko Sakai), a researcher in prophecies who enters his life again
to helping him learn of the cause.
The film in script, fitting for a
manga adaptation, evokes the cosmic horror of Junji Ito, the film able to have moved into his territory of the
openly surreal if the plot was changed halfway through, the premonitions a
literal curse which eventually cripples the victim with predictions of the
future they can rarely succeed in changing, suddenly in the midst of a random
activity forced into a trance where they scrawl the predictions on paper. As Hideki
learns, one is either doomed to being locked in a padded mental institution
room writing predictions on the wall with faecal matter or, if you attempt to
change the future in the one great sequence involving another's series of VHS
diaries, you get damned and removed off the face of the Earth. All this of this
is perfect but the film finds itself caught between this tantalising content
and an incoherent and eventually bland plot structure, succeeding very little
and fumbling. It doesn't help that a large part of it doesn't properly use the
cursed newspaper concept at all - CGI newspaper which moves and even growls at
people is just silly even in the ludicrous nature of this type of cosmic
horror. Even when it gets to its memorable final act, where reality is
completely undermined and Hideki is forced through a series of variously
horrible alternatives, it's been scuppered by the sluggish plotting of before
and an outcome that is ultimately syrupy in tone, leaving one disappointed in
the opportunities Premonition missed
out on.
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| From http://theatreofblood.se/sites/default/files/styles/ review_thumb/public/premonition3.jpg?itok=QJoJjLFb |
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