Tired of bad Asian Horror retreads of Ringu? Here's a movie that borrows a trick or two from it's cinematic cousin but has the common sense to weave those elements through a a story that, while nothing original, is still enough to hang a first class horror film on. Full of energetic style and just the right amount of self awareness Phone doesn't wink at the audience or blink when you want a full on ghostly stare. A difficult film to review without spoilers but here's my try.
PHONE Tartan Asia Extreme
Hype, or the inability of a film to live up to it is the film critics curse. You do learn to lower your expectations but you also get tired of having to. For myself this is especially true of horror movies where the gulf between the great and the ghastly is enough to make a poor critic cry. On the one hand you have to respect almost anyone who loves the genre enough to contribute a film to it. Filmmaking is hard work and sometimes really bad films still bear the marks of love left by people who, though almost completely untalented manage, to get their love of the medium up on the screen. On the other hand a lot of what gets hyped to us horror fans is just plain horrible. Bad acting, bad scripts, bad effects, bad direction. Enough said.
But every once in a while you encounter films that amply reward your expectations. They live up to and sometimes even surpass the hype. Perhaps no group of genre fans has had it as good in the last few years as those who love horror. And no place on the globe has turned out more truly great and very good horror films as Asia. Besides Ringu and its sequels there Asia has served up Uzumaki, Kairo, Audition, the original made for TV Juon, and the Three anthologies. Critics will debate how they feel about these films as films but they all have in common a distinct and stylistic grasp of what it is that scares instead of what merely entertains or shocks. Phone is one of the best examples of why fans continue to bother.
A female reporter goes into hiding to wait out the heat cause by her series on sex scandals. But despite changing the number on her cell phone and moving to a friends house she continues to receive strange and threatening phone calls. But what had been annoying becomes unbearable when her friend’s young daughter answers one of the calls and begins acting in strange and threatening manner. Ghostly visions, gruesome deaths and revealed secrets are just part of the package. The plot description doesn’t begin to do Phone justice.
There’s no doubt the film borrows an important page from Ringu. Yes there are ghosts with long black hair; yes the protagonist is a female reporter. But these ideas and the idea of technology (in this case a cell phone instead of a video tape) as a channel through the supernatural evil can prey upon the living are handled as parts of a story, and not just as conventions of some newly emerging horror sub genre.
The cell phone as a symbol of intimacy, a channel through which desire and vengeance, love and hate, can have equal access is deeply at the heart of what lifts Phone above other films which borrow so much from Ringu. But so do its powerful sequences of suspense and careful plotting. This is a much more complicated film than Ringu, offering plots and subplots that turn on one another just as it’s central symbol the cell phone does. A cell phone is at once intimate and impersonal, a device to connect with and hide behind. This dualism is reflected by all the characters.
Phone doesn’t really do anything new with the ghost story, or even Asian horror and it certainly doesn’t play to the art house aspirations of something like the excellent A Tale of Two Sisters despite skillful stylistic camera work and editing. It plays simpler, yet seems all the richer for it becoming the sort of tale that can be heard again and again while remaining enlightening and entertaining.
Seo-woo Eun is mesmerizing as Yeong-Ju. In fact I dare say this is one of the best-directed child performances I’ve ever seen. Not only is this child a remarkably gifted actress but Ahn Byeong-Ki knows exactly how to showcase her. She is utterly convincing in a role that demands much more than the conveyance of simple emotions. To say more would give away the plot of the film.
The DVD offers what I found to be a disappointing audio commentary by child actor Eun and is scene specific instead of feature length. But there are interviews and a short making of featurette as well as previews of several titles in what is proving to be a great line of DVD’s. Hopefully the extreme in Tartan Asia Extreme will continue to be about presenting extremely high quality films like Phone