Premonition

Hideki picks up a paper and sees headlines from the future. That is, as long as it's something bad. Then he reads about the death of his daughter and tries to figure out how to stop it from happening.

He, his wife and five-year-old daughter are driving. They stop so he can use a public phone to send email. In the booth, he finds a paper that says his daughter died in a car accident. A huge truck plows into the car and keeps on going. It turns out the driver was already dead.

Three years later he's teaching and the students are paying no attention at all and he doesn't seem to care. His ex-wife is conducting one particular person planting images onto unexposed polaroid film. She's trying to find out if it's possible to have a newspaper report the future, just like her ex-husband had said he saw.

The woman she had been using to impress images upon the film warns the ex-wife (Tachihara) that she needs to stop trying to find out about the Newspaper of Terror theory and the people who have claimed they can read the future articles.

He sees that a girl in his class writes on a paper a future article about a murder. There's also a time loop involved. The next newspaper he sees has the same article in it. Tachihara gets a strange phone call and goes to see the woman who had been making images on unexposed film.

(All the things seen in the newspaper articles refer to deaths and destruction.)

She finds the woman from the experiment dead. He figures out he will die since he has the ability to read the paper and see the future. His ex-wife wants him to fight whatever is going on. One day in class he writes a prediction himself. It happens, and he meets a guy who seems to know he made the prediction.

So they go to see the guy who literally wrote the book on the subject. They find the place and a video record he made of attempts to alter the destinies seen in the newspaper articles. When he succeeds, though, it seems he's punished physically.

So he has a problem. If he saves people, he's punished and will die. If he doesn't, he'll continue to write predictions and go mad.

The rest of the movie deals with him trying to figure out what to do.

I think the film is sort of classified as depressing sort-of horror. At no time does it clear up any of the major questions, such as who or what is behind the newspaper phenomena, or why certain people can see the future in newspaper headlines and others can't, and why are people shown any of these when there is nothing they can do about them except, in the end, sacrifice their own lives?

It's not the worst film of this kind that I have ever seen, but it's definitely not a very good film at all.


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