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, Yoko, 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. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide