Director: Huh Jung
Year: 2017
Country: South Korea
Alternate Titles: Jang-san-beom
Genre: Ghosts
Plot:
Traveling into the wilderness, a troubled family trying to heal itself from a series of tragedies finds that the reclusive girl they found in the woods nearby leads them into a series of confrontations with a deadly ghost that can mimic human voices and try to protect themselves.
Review:
This was quite the fun if somewhat flawed effort. What really works nicely for this one is the fact that it manages to really exploit the concept of it's central ghostly figure. This one offers up an entirely novel and chilling ghost that has a great backstory and gets to employ a rather unique concept of mimicking human sound and voices to great effect throughout here which is quite intriguing when it starts to attack. This idea creates a rather enjoyable premise as this goes on where the physical limitations it shows, as the blurry vision and onset of hearing loss, combine together into a truly chilling effort. The way that it ties into the folklore of the area connecting the ghost with the legend that is played out in a stand-out sequence that brings this to chilling life in a great way to enhance that aspect of the story even further.
This in turns leads into the strong action scenes that emerge from this setup. The opening scene showing the couple confronting the creature inside the cave at the side of the forest, complete with the attack on the lone victim, serves as a nice warm-up to the later scenes of the family sensing the spirit around them in places like closets or bathrooms which gives this one enough of a horror feel that it maintains that sense of dread leading nicely into the stellar finale. Taking place within the creature's underground cave home, the freakiness experienced in the setting gives way to the series of confrontations and escapes from that titular ghost, utilizing the strong series of battles in the caves alongside the use of various objects around them to give this a highly intriguing and fun finale. Alongside the great look of the ghost, these here hold it up over it's few obvious flaws.
The biggest issue here is the overall sense of blandness that overcomes a majority of the film. Very little happens here that actually affects the family in the film, as things continually build involving the girl which is barely acknowledged within here in order to focus on the other storylines that aren't even all that well-developed anyway. Going from the idea of the troubled family with the mother's mental issues and their own troubling nature regarding the missing child all tend to get brought up yet then routinely ignored which is really troubling. There are several storylines brought out of this setup, as in how the grandmother knows the girls' history or the police investigations into the disappearances which is brought up and then all but ignored which just doesn't do much overall here since this relies mostly on familiar tropes in their place. These here really hold this one down.
Overview: ***/5
With some decent elements brought to beat here and a few solid, likable elements, this emerges as a solid if not entirely overwhelmingly important piece from the country. Give this a look if you're intrigued in the slightest or find the positives more worthwhile than the negatives while those looking for more than just what normally emerges from South Korea should heed caution.
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