The plot revolves around Yumi Nakamura, a young psychology student whose friend Yoko gets a strange voice message on her cell phone.

While out at a mixer with friends, Yoko Okazaki misses a call on her cell phone, playing a peculiar ringtone different from her usual one, and notices the caller ID says it came from her own number.

She and her friend Yumi Nakamura listen to the message left on the phone, dated two days into the future, and hear Yoko's voice say that it's starting to rain, followed by a horrendous scream.

They trace the autopsy records to a girl named Mimiko Mizunuma who died from an asthma attack and whose mother Marie went missing.

At an orphanage, Yamashita meets Nanako, who will not speak but has a teddy bear that plays the same melody as the ringtone from the calls to the victims.

Yumi goes home and Yamashita is called back to the police station, where a video tape found at the Mizunumas' abandoned apartment reveals that the one abusing Nanako was Mimiko.

In Yumi's apartment, her clock starts ticking backward to the time of her death the voice mail foretold, and Mimiko appears.

The website's "Critics Consensus" said the film "has a few interesting ideas and benefits from director Takashi Miike's eye, but is ultimately too unoriginal to recommend".

[8] Entertainment Weekly wrote, "One Missed Call is so unoriginal that the movie could almost be a parody of J-horror tropes", yet "Miike, for a while at least, stages it with a dread-soaked visual flair that allows you to enjoy being manipulated".

[9] Dana Stevens of The New York Times mentions that "[the film] staggers under the weight of its director's taste for baroque excess".

[10] According to Nick Schager of Slant Magazine, the film is "[a] mainstream J-horror flick that dutifully regurgitates the apparitions, aesthetic, and themes of its genre predecessors".