Face (2004)
Original Title: 페이스
Translation: Face
Director: Yoo San-Gang
If you look at the cover and watch the first 10-15 minutes, it's a total bait n' switch from the actual movie you'll watch. This is not a post-Ringu horror film so much as it is a police procedural/crime lab film in which the long-haired Asian ghost is mainly an impetus for the main character to get off his rump and start doing his job.
The film begins with a woman in strapped to a bed in a clandestine operating room getting her heart forcibly removed by an unknown doctor-type. We jump to the present, in which Jin, daughter of Lee Hyun-Mi (Shin Hyun-Joon, of Barefoot Ki-bong and Stairway to Heaven), has just gotten a heart transplant and is having difficulties adapting to her new heart. After a stint in the hospital, Lee takes her to her grandmother's house in the sticks to recover and breathe some fresh air. Lee is a master in the field of face reconstruction, but is planning on leaving his job to stay with his daughter. Before he can do that, an up-and-coming young lady in the same industry, Jung Sun-Yong (Song Yun-Ah, of Jail Breakers and Wedding Dress), shows up at his house with a skull for him to reconstruct.
Initially, Hyun-Mi just wants to be left alone so he can be with his daughter. But after he starts getting haunted by a female ghost, he gets the message and starts reconstructing the face of the skull with Sun-Yong's assistance. Meanwhile, a detective named Min-ho (Oh Jung-se, of The Call and When the Camellia Blooms) has been investigating the case of all these skeletons popping up--apparently, Hyun-Mi and his workplace have already done more than a few for the police. His investigation takes him to the same hospital where Jin had gotten her heart transplant. And considering that the surgeon who performed the transplant, Dr. Yoon (Ahn Seok-Hwan, of Heartbreak Hotel and Shotgun Love), is reluctant to tell Hyun-Mi just who the donor is, things are starting to look mighty suspicious.
Face is creepy in the first fifteen minutes during the initial hauntings, but once Hyun-Mi gets to work reconstructing the face of the skull Sun Yong brings him, the supernatural elements take a back seat to what is more of a police procedural drama. There is a big twist right before the climax that is actually surprising, although the metaphysics of it make little sense if you stop to think about it. That said, besides the genre bait and switch, the problem with Face is the lack of immediacy and forward momentum to the story. Supposedly, he has to determine the identity of the victim in order to save his daughter, but the script and direction don't really convey a sense of urgency. In the end, the film has some interesting ideas, but fails in their execution.
The Wig (2005)
Original Title: 가발
Translation: Wig
Starring: Chae Min-Seo, Yoo Sun,
Director: Won Shin-yun
The idea of "evil hair" showed up (first) in John Carpenter's Body Bags, an anthology that featured a story called "Hair," about a hair transplant and an alien parasite. It was parodied to an extent--along with The Hands of Orlac--in The Simpsons "Treehouse of Horror IX", in which Homer wears a toupée of a recently-executed Snake, and then gets possessed. The Wig takes the general premise and treats it with the utmost seriousness.
Soo-hyeon (Chae Min-Seo, of Loner and Vegetarian) is dying of cancer. She apparently is in her last stages, judging from the emotional response of the orderly who is getting her belongings together before she leaves the hospital (presumably to spend her last moments at home with her sister). Said sister, Ji-hyeon (Yoo Sun, The Uninvited), shows up to bring her sister home with a little gift: a wig. If nothing else, she can at least enjoy her final days out and about the town without people looking at her funny.
Of course, as this film is called The Wig, you can imagine that things won't go so smoothly as Soo-hyeon simply taking walks in Seoul and then peacefully going in her sleep. There are a series of unexplained scenes at the very beginning that suggest something is not right. Moreover, a few brief shots of the wig suggest it might have a mind of its own. But once Soo-hyeon starts wearing it, that's where things start to change. At first it's a quick vision or two. Spooky, but manageable. But when a friend of Ji-hyeon's borrows the wig in an attempt to seduce her philandering husband into staying in their marriage, then things start to get weird. And it's not long before Soo-hyeon's personality starts to change, too.
The main problem with The Wig is that it tries to be a slow-burn horror, but takes too long to get to the interesting part, which is when Ji-Hyeon finally tries to find out what the deal is with the titular object. That portion is crammed into the third act, along with the climax, where the truth really comes out. Much time is spent trying to develop the characters, but considering the minimal dialog, the fact that Ji-hyeon is a mute (due to a random accident that makes sense at the end), and director Won Shin-yun's intentional obfuscation of story details, it's hard to really get a true feel for the characters. He wants us the viewer to meet him halfway with the story, but doesn't give us much to really work with until the last half hour or so. The finale is tragic, made even worse by the last-second introduction of information that further muddies the moral waters of a character's actions, But that said, The Wig is rarely scary, or even creepy. It's mainly melancholic with the occasional graphic image.
Original Title: 거울속으로
Translation: Inside the Mirror
Starring: Yoo Ji-tae, Kim Myung-min, Kim Hye-na, Kim Myung-soo, Gi Ju-bong, Lee Yeong-jin
Director: Kim Sung-ho
Much like Face, this is another thriller in which the horror elements mainly exist to set up a police procedural. In contrast to that film, this movie has a more interesting story, more well-developed characters, and ultimately a better pay off. It does run a little long at 113 minutes, but it's the most satisfying of the past three K-horror films I've watched this month.
The movie begins at a department store that is a few days away from its reinauguration following a deadly fire the year before. An employee named Choi Mi-jeong (Lee Yeong-jin) is leaving the place after hours, but not before pilfering a few items from the establishment, including a stainless steel pizza cutter. After a false scare involving a security guard, Choi heads to the bathroom in compose herself before leaving. Curiously, her work badge falls off when she's looking at herself in the mirror. But when Choi bends over to pick it up...her reflection stands completely still...and then takes the pizza cutter...
After Choi's body is found in the bathroom, there's a media circus involving the corpse, both because of the upcoming inauguration and the fact that the company still hasn't paid reparations to the families of those who perished in the fire. Nonetheless, the president of the company, Jeong Il-sung (Gi Ju-bong, of Joint Security Area and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance), only cares about the reinauguration and the bottom line. So it annoys him to no end when Police Inspector Heo Hyun-Su (Kim Myung-min, of Monstrum and The Battle of Jangsari), shows up to transform the department store into a base of operations for a homicide investigation. His presence is cemented by the mysterious elevator death of another employee.
Enter the president's nephew: Woo Yeong-min (Yoo Ji-tae, of Oldboy and The House that Jack Built). Woo is a disgraced former detective and now the head of security for the mall. The director of the mall, Choi Sang-gi (Kim Myung-soo, of Joint Security Area), asks Woo to run a parallel investigation. So, while Inspector Heo is looking into the history of the department store and the fact that the victims of these mysterious deaths worked in the same administrative department, Security Chief Woo begins to investigate the one member of the team who died in the aforementioned fire, which brings him into contact with her mentally-ill sister, Lee Ji-hyeon (Kim Hye-na, of Melo and Red Eye). Ji-hyeon spent time in a mental institution and used to believe that she could communicate with her sister through mirrors. In fact, according to her, her deceased sister is still hiding inside the mirrors...
One thing I liked is how the two parallel investigations allow the viewer to learn more about what's going, albeit from two different angles. While Woo and his interactions with Lee Ji-hyeon help paint a picture of who the film's resident spectre is, it's the investigation of Inspector Heo that puts context to the ghost's backstory and raison d'être. Both stories push the entire plot forward, as opposed to Face, which is mainly about the main character getting the gumption to mold clay onto a face while the supporting police guy just figures out stuff that we ourselves already have noticed. The strained relationship between Chief Woo and Inspector Heo is also compelling as the two slowly come to terms with the tragic incident that ended Woo's police career. Compare with Face, where the police investigation subplot runs independent of the main story thread until the very end.
Is Into the Mirror scary? After the initial batch of supernatural deaths, not very. But the story is engrossing and there is some neat photography, especially some tracking shots that made me think of Dario Argento in his best moments. The use of mirrors as a modus operandi for the ghost's killings is neat, but they also serve to show us how Chief Woo is wrestling with his past self and what he'd like his present self to be. The finale is a bit protracted before the expected supernatural retribution takes place. The film ends on a twist that I didn't see coming and should have viewers pondering its implications for a few days.
Remade by Hollywood in 2008 as Mirrors with Keifer Sutherland.
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