The Uninvited Review

What follow is a revised and updated version of a review for Korean horror film The Uninvited that originally ran in the early days of ScreenAnarchy. This was actually the very first film we ever reviewed here. I've long said that it's an unfairly overlooked little gem of a film, and it has just been given an R1 DVD release via PanikHouse.

One of the beautiful things about foreign films is the way they can force you to rethink all of your assumptions, how they can take genre conventions that are played out and stale here in North America and turn them on end in new and unexpected ways. Such is the case with The Uninvited. I'd heard very little about this film until it picked up an award at the 2004 Fantasia Festival and the ensuing buzz earned it an immediate spot on my shopping list. Good choice.

So what's it all about? The film opens on Jung Won, a renovator on his way home from a job, who falls asleep on the subway on his way home. He awakens with a jolt at the the last stop, bolts from the train, and turns around just in time to see two little girls, apparently sound asleep, still in the train as it pulls away for its nightly cleaning. He learns the next morning that those two girls were discovered dead by the cleaning crew, evidently poisoned by their own mother. That night Jung Won has a vision of the two corpses sitting at his kitchen table.

"Ah", you're thinking, "Ghosts. It's a horror film." A reasonable assumption, but you're wrong. As the film develops we meet Yun - played as far against her My Sassy Girl stereotype as possible by Jun Ji-Hyun - a troubled narcoleptic woman, driven to the brink of extreme mental illness by her own visions, and who has recently lost a child of her own. From this point on the film becomes a gripping psychological case study of the burden of knowledge - Yun is a Cassandra like figure cursed to know the truth and be disbelieved by most, bringing destruction on those who listen and believe - childhood trauma, infanticide and the tensions between eastern religion and the Christianity that has taken deep roots in Korea.

This is not to say that there aren't horrific moments in the film - there are some devastatingly realistic stunt shots at key moments that I guarantee will leave you gasping for breath - but they are purely secondary to the major thrust of the film. The Uninvited takes a premise that would normally be grist for the standard genre mill and takes it to an entirely different level. Its characters are fully fleshed out, the performances are uniformaly strong and the film beautifully shot and edited.

The new North American release of the film hits store shelves today via PanikHouse and it lives up to their normal high standards. The transfer is anamorphic widescreen and very crisp with deep blacks and good contrast. The film comes with a full complement of special features subtitled in both English and Spanish - the inclusion of Spanish language options is a major calling card of the company - and includes behind the scenes features, an interview with stars Jun Ji-Hyun and Park Shin-Yang, a version of the film edited down to a fifteen minute run time (hee hee), a written essay by Art Black and much more. One odd moment comes in the forms of the commentaries, or rather commentary and unclassifiable other thing. The film contains two alternate audio tracks. One is a Spanish language commentary, the other an audio essay by Art Black that runs about half an hour and gives an excellent overview of the history of Korean genre film, particualrly how in just a few short years we've gone from having access to virtually no Korean films on these shores to being deluged in the Korean Wave. The essay does spend time specifically on The Uninvited but it ranges much farther afield than that and Black obviously knows his stuff. The essay versus commentary thing has happened before and while unusual is far from unheard of, but what makes this one odd is that Black was unavailable to deliver his own work, meaning that he wrote it out sepcially for this release, then sent the text to PanikHouse, who then had their Korean buyer read it aloud for the recording. A little odd, but the content is excellent regardless of how unusual the delivery may be.

While I would stop short of calling The Uninvited a classic it is certainly a very, very good film, one that deserves a much wider audience than it has. This release gives people a high quality, easily accessible option. Get to it.