Plot
In Tokyo, during an evening get-together with friends, Okazaki Yoko's (Anna Nagata) cell phone suddenly rings in an eerie, unusual tone, cartoon styled. Not recognizing the tone, Yoko doesn't pick up soon enough and the call goes into "voice mail" (chakushin). When she sees that the call/message was from her own phone number and dated two days into the future, both she and her friend Nakamura Yumi (Kou Shibasaki) listen intently to the message. What they hear is the voice of Yoko in casual chit-chat, followed by a horrendous scream and then dead silence, which visibly disturbs Yoko and Yumi.
The two girls attempt to laugh the message off and even share the story with their friends, who are just as clueless as them. She tells her friends that she received the call to her cell phone on Apr 16 at 9:44 p.m. Her cell phone indicated that the message was from Apr 18 at 11:04 p.m. At exactly 11:04 p.m. on April 18, Yumi receives a call from Yoko. During that call, Yoko goes through the very same chit-chat as was on her previous voice mail. As Yumi suddenly realizes what might happen next, she hears Yoko scream into the phone. Suddenly, Yoko is then violently thrown by an invisible force through a chain link fence and onto a speeding commuter train down below just passing by, decapitating her. Then, as Yoko's severed arm still holds the phone, the finger suddenly begins to dial a randomly picked phone number, and she also vomits a strange red candy.
Kawai Kenji's (Atsushi Ida) phone is next to receive a call and, like Yoko, misses it. He receives a voice message with himself cursing and then a loud scream, Yumi is with him and hears it too. Kenji saw a friend that he had to meet with and he said the same words of the message and then the doors of the elevator opened without the cabin, and as they but looked on, he was pulled into the shaft and plummets with the same screams of the message. He falls to his death at the bottom of the elevator and he vomits a red candy. His phone is still working on its own looking for another victim to kill.
Konichi Natsumi (Kazue Fukiishi) is at Yumi's house and her phone rings with a strange video of her and a body behind her. She then goes to a TV program for an exorcism. Yumi meets Hirochi Yamashita(Shinichi Tsutsumi) and with the help of him they go to the TV program. The exorcism is a complete disaster and the video of Natsumi becomes real. Yumi and Yamashita came to save Natsumi, but when they get to Natsumi her right hand turns to the back, her complete arm turns to the back of her neck and turns until her head falls off. Her decapitated body still walks and eventually falls down on the floor. A red candy comes out of her mouth that stops at Yumi's feet and the chilling ring tone sounds on Yumi's phone.
Yumi and Yamashita investigate the phone calls in an old hospital and they find a dead body of a woman with a phone that comes to life. The body is of Marie Mizunuma (Mariko Tsutsui), the mother of Mimiko (Karen Oshima) and Nanako, who they believe to be the killer ghost. The body comes to life when Yumi lays eyes upon it and begins to advance towards Yumi. Yamashita comes to the aid of Yumi but they are separated on either side of a door by the same force that killed Yoko, leaving Yumi trapped in the room with the ghost-corpse of Mizunuma and Yamashita helplessly looking on through a barred window at the side of the door. The ghost-corpse comes for Yumi and comes to strangle her to death. Yumi apologizes to Marie, crying and saying she will never leave her mother again, with Marie believing Yumi is her daughter.
After the incident the police have arrived and have seen to Yumi and Yamashita. An investigator talks to the pair and insists that Yamashita come to the orphanage where Mimiko and Nanako dwelt, for they have discovered some important evidence they need him to see.
In Yumi's apartment she is haunted by Mimiko and Yamashita comes to save her, but Yumi stabs Yamashita in the stomach. As Yamashita collapses onto the floor he sees that instead of Yumi's reflection in nearby mirror, it's Mimiko, who turns to look at him, indicating that Mimiko has possessed Yumi. The vision of Mimiko says that she'll take him to the hospital, much as she did for her sister while she was alive. Later, Yamashita wakes up in the hospital with Yumi in the room with a knife hiding behind her back. It turns out that Mimiko, not Marie, was abusing Nanako all along. She leans forward and gives him the same kind of red candy that appeared with all of the victims, then waits. When Yamashita seems to enjoy the candy, Yumi smiles, and the spirit of Mimiko has obviously found another person to "take care of" as she did with her little sister. The film ends with the song Ikutsuka no Sora by Kou Shibasaki.
Read more about this topic: One Missed Call (2004 Film)
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“If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)