NOTE: Please be aware that this DVD is a Hong Kong import and is coded for Region 3 DVD players. In order to view this DVD, you'll have to have either a Region 3 coded or Region Free DVD player. It will not play in standard Region 1 North American DVD players.

Tun (Ananda Everingham) works as a photographer, fresh out of college. He and his girlfriend, Jane (Natthaweeranuch Thongmee), are driving home one night when they run over a girl who suddenly appears in the middle of the road out of nowhere – or at least they think they do. Rather than get out of the car and make sure she's okay, the hightail it out of there to avoid any trouble with the law.

A day or two later and Tun is taking pictures at the school's graduation ceremony. When he takes the film in to be developed, he's confused by some white, smoky images that appear on almost all of the pictures, and by what appears to be a spectral face in the background of a shot he took in front of one of the more prominent buildings on campus. At first he thinks that the pictures weren't developed right but when he finds that these images appear on the negatives as well as the prints, he starts to think that something might up amiss.

As Tun finds more and more unusual instances occuring with his photography, Jane sets out to try and figure out where these images are coming from and why. As the manifestations become stronger, she begins to piece things together bit by bit until she finds out that there's a lot more to this than Tun is letting on and that the spirit that is haunting them is somehow tied to his not too distant past.

Shutter is very derivative of a few of the more popular Japanese ghost stories that have hauled in the big box office bucks the last few years. As you're watching the film, it will conjure up memories of Hideo Nakata's Ring and Takashi Shimizu's Ju-On: the Grudge. A creepy young Asian woman with long black hair does play a large part in all of the ghastly proceedings, and a few of the scares are lifted from those earlier films. That being said, Shutter manages to carve out its own special little place in and amongst the other multitudinous entries in the genre by being smart enough to be interesting and by making us care enough about the characters to really react when the scares hit.

Directed by Thai filmmakers Banjong Pisanthanakun and Parkpoom Wongpoom, the movie has plenty of style and even more atmosphere. They make very nice use of the dark room and studio apartment and are able to conjure up a very effective atmosphere of claustrophobia in a couple of scenes, most notably when the ghost manifests in a school laboratory and, in the horrific highlight of the film, when the spirit wreaks havoc in Tun's studio shortly after he completes some wedding portraits.

Ananda Everingham and particularly Natthaweeranuch Thongmee do a great job as the male and female leads respectively, and Achita Sikaman is in fine form as the wayward phantom in need of vindication. All three performers are suitably believable and Thongmee specifically does a very good job of portraying the confusion and mixed emotions that her character would be experiencing if one were to go through similar events in real life.

Video:

Shutter is presented in a good but not great 1.85.1 anamorphic widescreen transfer. Obviously taken from a PAL source and converted over to NTSC for this release, there are a few scenes where there is some very slight ghosting evident on the image. The colors look a bit flat but I'm quite certain that this was a stylistic choice and isn't a problem with the authoring. Also worth mentioning is that a few scenes blur a slight bit when things move quickly. This may sound horrible but really it's pretty minor. Most of the time the image is pretty solid. There's a surprising level of detail present throughout the movie and the black levels, which play a really, really big role in the movie, stay strong throughout. There are no problems with mpeg compression and I only really grimaced at on glaring instance of edge enhancement.