Photography often plays an important role in film. Some truly great films actually focus on the act of photography itself, including Rear Window, Blow-Up, and Fur (among countless documentaries). It's surprising that more horror films don't focus on irregularities in photographs. Sinister/2 and Ginger Snaps toy with it, and plenty of slashers feature prevy photography scenes, but very few actually center themselves on this art.
Shutter is arguably the best of them all. It's a fairly typical Thai horror. That means it's almost episodic. The scenes are short and all have a jump in them. Spirits are accepted as real. Everyone has secrets and it's entirely up to the audience to put all the pieces together themselves.
Tun and Jane leave a wedding reception and promptly run over a young woman in the street. They leave the scene and pretend nothing happened. At Jane's graduation, every photo Tun takes is obscured by bright white streaks or a menacing shadow that looks like the hit and run victim. Tun, a professional photographer, refuses to believe that the shadow/obstruction is a ghost, but Jane forces him to research everything there is to know about spirit photography.
Shutter is a really overwhelming experience. The staccato pacing and guaranteed jump in every scene are unsettling. Sure, directors Banjong Pisanthanakum and Parkpoom Wongpoom borrow a lot of these gags from the masters, but they also create a few that are now modern horror mainstays. You can basically thank these two for Sinister being a thing, since the best scares from those two films are lifted directly from Shutter.
Probably the weakest element of the film is the design of the ghost herself. Natre is one of the many stringy haired, wet, pale ghosts to emerge after Ringu took over the world. Shoot, even the marketing campaign stole imagery from Sadako's adventures in VHS tapes. That doesn't make Natre's role in the film any less significant; it's just a minor creative deficit in an otherwise innovative horror.
Much like the Pang Brothers' The Eye and the masterful Nobuo Nakagawa feature Jigoku, Shutter really sets itself apart when it full embraces local religion and culture in its storytelling. The second act shifts from investigative ghost story to meditation on the afterlife through funeral ceremony and prayer. One of the best scares in the entire film happens at a funeral in a temple. It's such an unnerving contrast to the hustle and sterility of the modern college town that you're just not prepared for anything else to come in the film.
Shutter uses a lot of jump scares, but has the greater narrative and design elements to justify them. I can't say if a film so driven by narrative-essential twists at the end will hold up on repeat viewings, but it's a hell of a ride the first time through.
Shutter is currently streaming on Shudder.