One Missed Call (2008)

One Missed Call arrives in 2008 as the American remake of Takashi Miike's 2003 chiller, itself drawn from a Yasushi Akimoto novel, and it carries the distinction of a zero percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, a Moldy Tomato Award, and a CinemaScore of D. Critics were not screened, which tells us plenty. The film concerns a cursed voicemail that predicts the date, time, and manner of the recipient's death, a premise it executes with lullaby ringtones, red candies, and a great deal of screaming.

For our purposes, the picture is a wasteland. The cast includes Ana Claudia Talancón and Meagan Good, a modest diversity for a 2008 horror release, but the arrangement reflects ordinary hiring, not a representation program. Shannyn Sossamon anchors the story as a woman pursued by a supernatural curse, which is the horror genre's oldest furniture, and no feminist reading survives contact with the script. There is no LGBTQ content, no racial commentary, no climate anxiety, no class warfare against the television producer who serves as a plot device, no body-positive messaging, and no neurodivergent advocacy. Munchausen by proxy and childhood asthma appear, but as mechanisms of dread, not as representation. The film is a remake and makes no attempt to revise history, because it has no history to revise.

Above all, there is no sermon. The movie wants to frighten us with phones and then end. It fails at the frightening, but it never once lectures, which in this climate is its own small mercy.

We are left with a document of pure commercial calculation, a studio hoping a recognizable title and a ringing phone would suffice. It did not. The curse, like the film, simply runs out of people to call.