Beth Raymond (Shannyn Sossamon) hasn't had a very good time lately. She's just witnessed the deaths of two of her friends under very strange and disturbing circumstances: shortly before their deaths by way of freak accident, they received phone calls in which they heard their deaths occur.

Beth takes the information to the police, who promptly decide she's out of her tree. But one cop, Detective Jack Andrews (the always reliable Ed Burns), isn't so sure. He recently lost his sister under eerily similar circumstances, and together they team up to investigate the apparently supernatural phenomenon prowling Beth's social circle, costing people their very lives.

A person could be forgiven for thinking they're in for nothing but a retrofitted attempt to mimic the success that was The Ring a few years ago, but that would be a mistaken assumption, a handful of superficial similarities notwithstanding. I went in with an appropriately low level of anticipation, but that turned out to be a mistake as well, fortunately. One Missed Call neither recycles too much from any semi-horror predecessor nor suffers too terribly from the dreaded PG-13 rating I was just sure would confine it to a straitjacket of creative self-restraint most teen horror flicks subject themselves to in the interest of box office returns.

One Missed Call pleasantly surprised me with some very creative imagery, far more eerie moments than I expected, and a story that is better-executed than it might appear on the surface, for all its similarities to other films. Ed Burns brings his ultra-natural performance to the table, which doesn't hurt any, and the film's resolution was not what I expected, either. It certainly won't win any awards, but it earns far more points for originality and creativity than its trailer might suggest.

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