Introduction: Ring, Ring… It’s Mediocrity
Horror sequels are tricky. You can either expand on the mythology (Evil Dead II), reinvent the formula (Halloween III—okay, maybe not), or you can do what One Missed Call 2 does: press “repeat” until the audience’s soul disconnects. This film is the cinematic equivalent of a spam robocall: repetitive, unwanted, and guaranteed to leave you muttering, “Why did I even pick this up?”
The Premise: You’ve Got Voicemail, and Also Coal Dust
The setup is familiar: cursed phone calls still kill people, because Japan’s horror boom in the early 2000s insisted technology was haunted and we should all go back to smoke signals. This time, though, we’re given new lore. Apparently, the curse now involves coal dust, Taiwanese family drama, and a bullied girl named Li Li who had her mouth sewn shut in a mine. It’s less horror, more like a rejected X-Files plot written on NyQuil.
Coal dust? Really? Nothing says terror like particles OSHA regulates. Forget Sadako’s well or Kayako’s house of contorted corpses—here, the ultimate evil is basically black lung.
The Characters: Victims in Search of a Script
Our lead is Kyoko, a kindergarten teacher who looks perpetually confused, probably because she signed on to a sequel without reading the contract. She’s joined by Naoto, her boyfriend who photographs things but is mostly there to eventually die for her in a scene that’s supposed to be moving but lands with the emotional weight of a missed text.
Then there’s Takako, a journalist whose entire personality is “exposition dispenser.” She’s estranged from her husband Yuting, which is supposed to give her depth, but mostly makes you wonder if even he got tired of hearing her recap cursed-call statistics.
And of course, Mimiko is back, the evil little girl ghost with a sweet tooth. She spends most of the movie lurking, glaring, and spitting red hard candy like a discount Halloween piñata. It’s never scary—it’s like Willy Wonka staged a hostile takeover of The Ring.
The Death Scenes: Copy, Paste, Yawn
J-horror is supposed to terrify with atmosphere and dread. One Missed Call 2 instead gives us “burnt face in a kitchen,” “shower murder while on video chat,” and “the black-haired figure reaching through a phone.” Each kill is shot like the director set the camera down, left the room, and hoped the ghosts would figure it out themselves.
There’s no tension, no build-up, just a conveyor belt of “here’s the cursed ringtone, now please die politely.” The deaths are so uninspired they make the Final Destination franchise look like avant-garde performance art.
The Lore Expansion: From Silly to Stupid
The first One Missed Call at least had a clean premise: you get a phone call from your future self predicting your death. Creepy, simple, effective. The sequel takes that and says, “But what if we added generational trauma, Taiwanese coal miners, incest rumors, and a side-quest about a girl named Li Li who curses people verbally until her town sews her mouth shut?”
This isn’t deepening the mythology; it’s throwing spaghetti at the wall. By the end, you’re not scared—you’re lost, like you accidentally walked into the wrong lecture and the professor is already fifteen slides into cursed anthropology.
Geography of Horror: J-Horror, Now With Frequent Flyer Miles
For reasons never fully justified, the story hops from Japan to Taiwan like a supernatural travel documentary. We learn that cursed calls are happening worldwide, which sounds terrifying until you realize it just means international roaming charges. Ghosts don’t need borders, but the movie somehow manages to make global horror feel like a franchise expansion pack: One Missed Call: International Plan.
The Big Twist: “Gotcha! It Wasn’t Mimiko, It Was… Still Mimiko”
One of the film’s late reveals is that Yumi, the heroine from the first film, wasn’t possessed—she was just evil all along. Except this is dropped via a single line of dialogue and then promptly ignored. It’s like the filmmakers realized they had unused footage from the first movie and thought, “Eh, let’s retcon something.”
Meanwhile, Takako discovers she’s already dead and Mimiko has been using her corpse as an avatar to kill people. This twist could have been chilling if it weren’t buried under so much coal-dust backstory and if we hadn’t already checked out emotionally 40 minutes ago.
The Villains: Ghost Children Need Better Agents
Mimiko, the candy-popping demon girl, is supposed to be the franchise’s Sadako or Kayako. Instead, she’s more like the kid at Halloween who won’t stop TP-ing houses. Li Li, the sewn-mouth coal child, is introduced as if she’ll be the new big bad, but she ends up more of a side quest than a threat.
Two evil ghost girls competing for screen time? It should’ve been a dream tag-team. Instead, it’s a narrative custody battle where the loser is the audience.
The Tone: Death by Melodrama
Instead of building dread, the film drags us through soap opera subplots—estranged spouses, family trauma, tragic sacrifices. Naoto nobly answers Kyoko’s cursed call to save her, which might’ve been touching if he’d been given a personality beyond “boyfriend with a job.” Instead, it feels like the movie shoved him into a meat grinder just to tick the box for tragic romance.
Meanwhile, Takako’s arc ends with her smiling and spitting out candy after realizing she’s been dead for hours. It’s supposed to be haunting. It looks like she just choked on a Jolly Rancher.
Direction: Renpei Tsukamoto Phones It In
Director Renpei Tsukamoto treats scares like jump-scare alarms on snooze: every time you think something’s about to happen, it doesn’t, and when it does, it’s laughable. The pacing is glacial, the scares predictable, and the editing so flat you wonder if the real curse was Final Cut Pro crashing mid-production.
The Candy Motif: Sugar-Coated Nonsense
Mimiko’s signature red candy should be iconic. Instead, it’s ridiculous. Ghostly hard candy as a death omen is the least intimidating horror motif ever. Freddy has his glove. Jason has his machete. Mimiko has…confectionery. The final shot of a ghost spitting out candy is less “chilling” and more “Halloween candy ad rejected for being too weird.”
Final Verdict: A Wrong Number
One Missed Call 2 is proof that not every horror film needs a sequel. What began as a neat little tech-urban legend devolves into a bloated mess of bad lore, bland characters, and supernatural sugar highs. It’s not scary, it’s not fun, and it’s barely coherent.
If you want atmospheric J-horror, rewatch Ringu or Ju-On. If you want a cursed call story, dial up the original. But if you want to waste 90 minutes on incoherent ghost drama, by all means, answer One Missed Call 2. Just don’t be surprised when you wish you’d let it go to voicemail.
Because in the end, the only real horror here is the realization that there’s a One Missed Call 3.
