Disclaimer: Contains spoilers!
Plot Summary: A depressed woman turns her attention to spying on her neighbors only to discover something more may be going on in their apartment building.
Review: My eyes are rolling here (as usual). Once again (and again and again) we have a case of wasted potential! I'd love to meet these writers that come up with really cool, creative, and interesting approaches to horror films only for them to completely drop the ball along the way. Maybe someone else ruins these movies along the way, but this is seriously a growing trend in recent horror movies. Let's start what with they did right: great atmosphere and mystery as we are given an interesting story about a workaholic, named Se-jin, who witnesses a suicide and becomes depressed because she did not intervene; I'll go more into that later. Anyway, Se-jin becomes bored and begins to watch her neighbors across from her building and the weird habit of their lights all going out at a certain time. She then learns that people are dying in that apartment building and begins to connect that to the flickering lights and that it happens at the same time each night. Unfortunately, this leads to many stupid occurrences and lots of padding to take this movie to the 90 minute mark; for example: Se-jin and her job never have any relevance, it being Christmas time, some nutcase shut-in, the police and their idiotic investigation, some teenage girl living in the building, etc. Eventually, you find out that a disabled girl named Yu-yeon, whom Se-jin had befriended, is actually a ghost and many of the things Se-jin has seen were hallucinations by the ghost. Also, the people who are dying were the individuals who tormented Yu-yeon in life. I will say this, Yu-yeon was well deserving of her revenge, but I seriously find it hard to believe this many weirdos would work together to torture this girl. Back to that suicide at the beginning...now this greatly bothered me in the long run because it all amounts to nothing in the end. That woman had some vague connection to the story that I didn't understand, but we come to find out that rather than simply not helping the woman, Se-jin pushed her away and contributed to her death. But all of this is meaningless because all it does is serve to explain why Se-jin even cares to help Yu-yeon (and about the events of the movie for that matter), but it never comes back to have a real purpose overall which sucked. Lastly, in typical K-horror fashion, the ending made no sense as we are to assume Yu-yeon killed Se-jin (for some reason) and the one detective idiotically moves into the apartment building and then sees Se-jin's ghost...huh? Roll credits?! This one kind of pissed me off, I have to admit, because it had me going at the beginning and then let me down hard by the end. It's worth a view, but don't go in expecting anything; the ghost is also a major Kayako wannabe.
Notable Moment: When Yu-yeon appears as a ghost and is staring into the window and we see only her reflection. This was a most effective use of lighting and camera angles to make the ghost look significantly scarier than the makeup effects were pulling off.
Final Rating: 5.5/10
2 comments:
I recently watched this movie for the second time after many years and I agree with you about the potential it had before being stuffed with a bunch of non relating scenes. So you're telling me that when she saw the ghost lady outside in the open which she later was taken away by a neighbor was an illusion? Why are these ghosts so powerful? And at the end it seemed that our main character was going to do the same as the original ghost? Why? Why was she killed when she didn't do anything to deserve it. And that suicide at the beginning, that woman wanted to commit murder suicide, I think her actions were somewhat justified. I'm so confused I'm forgetting what little english I know.
In response to the previous user... If you have seen other movies from the same director you'll notice his brilliant cinematography, use of camera angles and movements, sound (in his films made in korea) and lighting. But there's always a lack of attention to detail in the scripts and lots of plot holes.
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