Rating:
★★
(Yogen)
Japan. 2004.
Crew
Director – Norio Tsuruta, Screenplay – Noboru Takagi & Norio Tsuruta, Based on the Manga Kyoufu Shinbun (Fear Newspaper) by Jiro Tsunoda, Producer – Takashige Ichise, Photography – Naoki Kayano, Music – Kenji Kawai, Visual Effects Supervisor – Mitsuaki Hashimoto, Special Effects Supervisor – Shuichi Kishiura, Makeup Effects – Akiteru Nakada, Production Design – Iwao Saito. Production Company – Fellah Pictures/Geneon Entertainment/Nikkatsu/Oz Co/Tokyo Broadcasting System (TBS).
Cast
Hiroshi Mikami (Hideki Satomi), Noriko Sakai (Ayaka Tachibara Satomi), Hana Inoue (Nana Satomi), Maki Horikita (Sayuri Wakakubo), Kazuko Yoshiyuki (Satoko Mikoshiba), Mayumi Ono (Misato Miyamoto)
Plot
Assistant professor Hideki Satomi, his wife Ayaka and their five year-old daughter Nana are diving back home to Tokyo. He is working on a deadline and stops by a telephone booth to upload his work when he sees a newspaper that predicts that Nana will die in an accident at 8 pm – a few minutes away. He is too late to do anything as a truck then strikes their car, killing Nana. Three years, he and Ayaka have divorced. He then begins to see other newspaper headlines predicting the stabbing of a pupil.
The idea of the newspaper that can offer tomorrow’s headlines first appeared on screen in It Happened Tomorrow (1944), a comedy with Dick Powell receiving a newspaper that showed tomorrow’s headlines. The same idea later became the basis of the tv series Early Edition (1996-2000) where Kyle Chandler would receive the morning newspaper that gave warning of a disaster that would happen later that day where he would then spend the whole episode trying to prevent it from occurring. The premise was also employed in Who is Running (1997), an early film from the Pang Brothers, and the Brownlow’s Newspaper episode of The Infinite Worlds of H.G. Wells (2001).
All of the abovementioned films are about the complications that occur as someone gets news in advance or else tries to prevent a disaster from occurring. Premonition is the only one of these that takes a horror approach. That is to say, there is little in it about the protagonist trying to prevent terrible things from occurring.
This is a film based on the manga Kyoufu Shinbun (1973-5), which translates as Fear Newspaper, which appeared in Shonen Champion. The same manga was later remade as a seven episode tv series Kyoufu Shinbun (2020).
Premonition is okay, nothing remarkable as Asian Horror goes. There is a jolting scene right at the start where Hiroshi Mikami is in a phone booth trying to upload his article when he picks up the newspaper and abruptly turns as a runaway truck smashes into the car parked across the road with his daughter inside. The rest of the time Norio Tsuruta creates some okay scenes as the various characters foresee various things about to happen and react to them, but nothing outstanding.
Premonition should not be confused with the US-made Premonition (2007) that came out not long after, which featured Sandra Bullock timeslipping through a week of her life.
Director Norio Tsuruta had begun making a trilogy of ghost stories for Japanese television, which were collected and released as Scary True Stories (1991-2). He went on to direct the J-horrors Ring 0: Birthdays (2000), Scarecrow (2001), Orochi (2008), King’s Game (2011), POV – A Cursed Film (2012) and Talk to the Dead (2013).
Trailer here
