Premonition

Premonition (予言, 2004) is a Japanese horror film by Norio Tsuruta, free to watch online on iFILM. Pulled over at a roadside phone booth, professor Hideki Satomi spots a torn scrap of newspaper carrying an obituary for his own little daughter — and seconds later a truck slams into the car.

Years pass. His marriage to Ayaka has fallen apart, the child is gone, yet that scrap of paper won't leave him alone. It turns out the page was no fluke. Now and then Hideki receives newsprint that reports deaths which haven't happened yet. Read one in time and he can step in. But the price for saving a stranger climbs with every attempt, and it is paid in the thing he can least afford to lose.

The movie belongs to the J-Horror Theater series and adapts Jiro Tsunoda's manga about a "newspaper of terror." Tsuruta helped set the template for quiet, creeping Japanese dread back in the nineties, and here he leans on doom rather than jump scares. Hiroshi Mikami plays a man trapped by his own guilt and hope. If slow, mournful horror like Ringu is your thing, this fits. Stream Premonition (2004) online on iFILM.