In Shutter, Ben Shaw (Joshua Jackson) drives Megumi Tanaka (Megumi Okina) to despair, insanity, and suicide, and Megumi’s ghost decides to pay him back by becoming a pain in the neck. Literally. That’ll learn him a lesson.
It’s not much of a horror movie when a chiropractor would do just as well as an exorcist (I’m kidding, of course; everybody knows chiropractors are quacks). Seriously though, the supernatural elements in Shutter are lackluster and fail to deliver any real scares.
While Ben complains of musculoskeletal pain, his two best friends, whom he watched rape Megumi as he sat idly by, encounter gruesome deaths, so I would say Ben got off easy.
Even as his brand-new marriage to Jane (Rachael Taylor) crumbles, as it were, under the pressure, Ben’s still breaking even. He’s gaining a monkey on his back, but losing a ball and chain.
In order to rid himself of the Curse of Bad Posture, Ben gives himself an extreme form of transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation. Kids, do not try this at home. I have no clue why he believed that approach would be effective, and as a matter of fact, it isn’t. Ben ends up a catatonic brokeback, Megumi still latched on to his back.
I get it. I do. Ben’s the bad guy — an unrepentant misogynist who thinks he can discard women as thoughtlessly as he would a pebble in his shoe. The irony, if we may call it that, of his being unable to shake Megumi loose no matter what he does is not lost on me. It’s like she went, “He thought I was clingy? I’m going to show him what clingy really means.”
All things considered, Ben is rightfully fucked. I’m down with that. It’s Megumi who I’m concerned about. Is her poor spirit really going to remain attached to Ben for the rest of his life? And if so, why? Isn’t the point of Unfinished Business that once you finish it, you get to move on?
It would have been more intriguing if Megumi’s ultimate goal had extended beyond tethering herself to Ben’s contorted and unresponsive body. What if she’d had something a little more machiavellian in mind all along?
What if giving Ben a killer case of chronic upper back pain had been a means to an end rather than an end in itself? Get him hooked on painkillers, turn him into a junkie, make him a statistic in the opioid epidemic. Now, there’s your socially conscious, topically on-point twist.