The Booth

Review

A DJ in a radio booth commits suicide sometime in the past when he hears strange things while broadcasting. Years later, another DJ is using the same booth. On the outside he appears to be a decent sort of person, but he has a very dark past and a very nasty demeanor.

He's about to find out that the things you do sometimes come back to haunt you in totally unexpected ways.

It's a good film, especially in that the majority of film is shot using only the booth and the control room. It's hard to do a good film with such limited locations (there were two others; a playground and a seaside place), but the film managed to still be good even with that strict constraint on the film.

Worth seeing. Better than average.

Synopsis

The film opens with a radio show being done. A 26 year old woman wants to marry a 22 year old student but his parents object.

The caller claims that she killed herself thirty years ago, but the boy is still alive. The woman claims the radio guy had betrayed her. The guy ends up hanging from the rafters.

Present time, a different show but using the same booth while their regular booth is worked on.

This is, of course, the same room the guy had killed himself in some years before. A cabinet door swings open of its own accord.

We seem to see flashbacks of his own life and they contradict what he is telling the caller.

Suddenly there are strange noises on the radio (just like with the broadcaster in the past), and a voice calls the radio dj a liar.

One of the other workers tells Shingo, the dj, about the past of the booth.

Apparently in the past he kept hitting on a girl who was engaged. The interference starts up again and again a voice calls him a liar (which is is, actually. It seems this stuff starts up whenever he tells a lie.)

Apparently in the past Shingo was playing around on the woman in the car.

Back in Shingo's past again, the woman in the car starts to hit him, he pushes her and she falls out of the car into the guardrail. She died.

The squeaky sound he had heard sounds just like the weather vane moving in the background in the past scene.

There's a new person scheduled to do the news segment.

Shingo sees someone watching him from another portion of the old studio.

In another past scene, the woman might not have been dead after all. She crawled back into the car but Shingo took off. Her scarf got caught and she was dragged for a ways. When he released the scarf she fell into the ocean.

He keeps remembering things from the past, his doing the same things his callers are complaining about in other people. He becomes so distracted that he's not really paying any attention to what is being said by his guest or his callers. He also thinks the police have shown up in the studio for him.

He sees the strange woman in the studio again.

She enters the room. It's the one he thought he had killed.

He relives another event in his past when he threw a rock at a girl who was swinging and she fell out of the swing.

He then sees a female ghost.

The people in the control book here the announcer from the past talking. He apparently hung himself life the other dj from the past.

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