Milking a genre ten years past its prime, former assistant director, Lee's first feature is (for better or worse) the near epitome of K and J Horror, with hangings, creepy apartment conspiracies and the all too uncooperative residents who begin to spout cryptic clues to the ghoulish goings on... and oh yes, kids... kids who, bring bad omens and then some. Not to rag on Lee continuously, as he does approach this with some tact and intelligence absent in most "Ringu" like clones, it is just rather truncated early on.
POSSESSED (translated literally from Korean as DISTRUST HELL) begins in a rather low-key mise-en-scene, in the washed out, fluorescent buzzing halls of a college where Hee-Jin (Nam Sang-Mi) scrambles to finish a test, through a violent coughing fit. She zombies her way to the pharmacy for more meds and hauls it home for rest, more class, meds, class, rest... And then a phone call. A rather alarming phone call from her kid sister, So-Jin (Shim Eun Kyung) at 3 in the morning. Half asleep, Hee-Jin barley realizes it's her sis, before the line is cut dead.
The next morn, her mom calls and wails So-Jin has gone missing. Time to go home.
Once there, Hee-Jin is ignored by her distant, though seemingly frantic Christian mother, whose off to church to pray for So-Jin's safe return.
Skeptical (and typically ineffective by Korean film standards) police detective, Tae-Hwan (Ryoo Seung-Yong) takes the case, writes it off as a "runaway" situation, and then to prove him oh so wrong, an increasingly eerie succession of neighbors make appearances; some living, some dead.
The flick stumbles into formulaic creepiness rather easily, and while it does it very well, I tuned out after about twenty minutes. Just about the mark when that relatively restrained unsettling of the beginning - more reminiscent of Kiyoshi Kurosawa films, an exception not a standard horror - turned into an excessively melodramatic, wish wash of supernatural gossip led by the lonely female neighbors, including a shaman. Turns out So-Jin hasn't been quite right since she almost died in a car crash two years back. A car crash where the girls lost their father.
The film seems to want to be a slow burn, one in which you are given little dollops of dread, and time to put a puzzle together. This is appreciated, the problem is, it isn't really meditatively eerie nor outright fun or scary in the way it is all conceived and given to the audience; imagery of shadows passing on the wall, ice cold faces at the window, things under the bed, foreboding animals, deep, dark basements, feel more hackneyed than homage... these far out number the few effective trappings the picture entails, namely the shamanistic rituals and use of bolts, locks and doors - particularly as jarring accents or cuts. It was here on the technical side where I was mildly impressed. The production is top notch from grating sound design, to winter washed photography, it just comes out as dully efficient, mildly effective, when the story and characters fail to take hold.
My disdain and boredom with the film obviously stemmed from a fast settling disappointment in how easily it fell into cliche. Once again to be fair to Lee, he tried to remold the familiar in a package that honored creeptastic tradition while gaining philosophical and theological ground, yet I felt he didn't get far enough in claiming new territory. Though the ambiguity of his spiritual anecdotes and technical breadth were appreciated, the picture left me the wrong kind of cold.
I walked in cold, not knowing a thing about the film, excited only by the mystery of a new picture, and left still cold, totally unfazed, if not rather perturbed. Luckily, I quickly became relieved, realizing that it was all over, and yes, life would go on.
POSSESSED aka LIVING DEATH is available on Region 3 DVD and will have its North American premiere as part of the Tribeca Film Festival, Friday, April 23rd, with further showings on April 24th, 25th and May 1st. Ticket info below.