Visionary horror film director Takashi Miike delivers a typically stylish and idiosyncratic scare-fest with this thriller. Yumi Nakamura (Kou Shibasaki) is a mildly paranoid young woman whose good friend receives a strange and mysterious call on her cell phone.
The phone's read-out says that the call came from Yoko's own number, but from three days into the future; 72 hours later, Yoko dies in a bizarre accident moments after getting the same call over again. Yumi learns that Yoko isn't the only person to have had this experience; the spirit of a vengeful woman has been creeping into people's cell phones, and one by one is taking the lives of the folks in their internal telephone books.
As Yumi struggles to solve the mystery of how and why this could be happening before someone else dies, she discovers the story has more to do with her than she imagined. Chakushin Ari was a major box-office success in Japan, where leading lady Kou Shibasaki is a popular recording artist as well as an actress.
Random people receive calls from themselves three days in the future, and three days later, they meet a horrifying end.
One night when college student Yumi Nakamura (Kou Shibasaki) is out for drinks with her friends, her buddy Yoko gets an unusual cell phone call. The ring tone is mysteriously different and the display reads ??One Missed Call??. When she checks the message, it seems to have come from her own phone. Even stranger, there are screams that sound like her own and it is dated three days in the future.
Three days later, at the exact time of the call and with the same piercing scream, Yoko plunges to her death from a railway bridge.
A few days after, Kenji, another friend of Yumi??s, receives the same sort of call dated three days in the future. The message too contains his own blood-curdling scream and he dies at the appointed hour.
One more victim. The same creepy ring. This time it's Yumi's best friend, Natsumi Konishi (Kazue Fukiishi), but the message is a little different. Video footage on the phone??s display shows someone's hand sneaking up behind her own terror-stricken self. Natsumi knows she is doomed and goes to pieces. Ignoring Yumi's pleas, she agrees to go on a live TV broadcast and undergo exorcism at the hour she is predicted to die.
Meanhile, Yumi, desperate to get to the bottom of things, teams up with a solitary Funeral Director, Hiroshi Yamashita (Shinichi Tsutsumi), whose sister was killed by the same horrifying curse. The two of them begin to follow the trail of deaths.
Natsumi's moment of truth approaches. At the forcecasted moment, live on national TV, she dies a horrifying death. As Yumi and Yamashita??s gazes fix upon her twisted corpse... Yumi's phone begins to ring.
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