Premonition
(aka Yogin)
(Lion's Gate Promotional Screener)
(2004)
review by Don't Feed the Dead

The second installment in Norio Tsuruta's "J-Horror Theater," Premonition is Lions Gate Film's first crack at cashing in on the Asian horror explosion. A crafty little story, Premonition is seemingly a combination of Final Destination and Kurosawa's Cure, intertwining predetermined fate and the human element as affected by psychosis. Heavily anticipated as the single "must see" asian horror film of 2005, Premonition blazed out of the American Film Market and into LGF's lap for a direct to DVD release.

What if you could read a newspaper article that told your fate? Would you act on it and do everything you can to preserve your own life and the loved ones around you? Professor Hideki Satomi is inadvertently placed in this situation when he picks up a scrap of paper while uploading an email at a phone booth. The paper is an obituary for his 5 year old daughter and describes how she dies at 8 PM of that very same day in a car wreck. Shocked at what he has just read, Hideki watches in disbelief as a truck veers off to the side of the road and smashes into his car, setting it ablaze and ultimately killing his daughter.

Three years later, Hideki and his wife Ayaka are separated. Crushed by the death of his daughter and spiraling into an obsession with the newspaper that foretold her death, Hideki withdrew from his marriage and was fingered as being crazy by his grieving wife. However, the roles are now reversed, as Ayaka seeks out knowledge of the "Newspaper of Terror", while Hideki tries to lead a normal life by putting his past behind him. Unfortunately, strange events and mysterious killings begin pooping up all over Japan and Hideki is once again visited by the troublesome newspaper obituary. Now convinced that her ex husband wasn't crazy after all, Ayaka seeks out Hideki to uncover the truth behind the newspaper before more deaths can occur.

Tsuruta's first American release in Premonition is bound to develop a cult following. From the intense storyline of predetermined fate to the gripping outcome of the film's finale, Premonition is a solid flick from beginning to end. Absent are the asian horror staples of dead girls with long black hair and stop motion photography, which add to the experience because the redundancy factor is nullified. The audience does not feel like they've seen Premonition a thousand times before, and this sense of freshness is welcome after the droves of Ringu and Grudge ripoffs crammed down our throats.

In a time when Asian horror has just about flooded the American markets to saturation, one cannot believe that a film existed that could still impress the masses. I firmly believe that Premonition will not only leave audiences in a state of shock, but bring new life to a trend that has since gone stale in the last year. If Premonition is a taste of what audiences can expect from Norio Tsuruta, then we might be looking at the director who supplants Nakata and Shimizu in the hearts of Hollywood studios.