Considering it's been six years since I last saw this film, I remember picking it up at a massive DVD sale at my local video store for about $1 or so, snatching it up and thinking... "I think I liked this when I first saw it" and then putting it in my DVD collection without a repeat viewing until tonight.
First, some background on this little Asiancentric mindset that I have.
Back in 2002, a little movie (with a $50M budget) known as The Ring was released to a smashing success, dominating the box office for a good while, spawning a sequel (around the same budget but doing about half the business of the first), and birthing a new evil entity legend to the pantheon of horror bad guys, Samara.
I may revisit this series in a future installment, when I have more time, but since I'm on a schedule of one movie a day, I need to make this side trip as short as possible.
I was so taken by this film and when I found out that it was a remake of a Japanese horror film, I of course had to seek that out. When I found out that it was based on a book, I of course had to seek that out. This led me into a wonderful, wonderful world of exploring Japanese literature (There are 6 books in the Japanese novel franchise, in case you were wondering: Ring, Loop, Spiral, Birthday, Promenade of the Gods, and S) and Japanese culture in general.
I began to listen to a lot of J-Pop (Japanese Pop Music) artists, such as Utada Hikaru
I have spent the last few years burning through every Asian horror movie that I can find on Netflix. Sometimes it pays off and I'm handed something refreshing, exciting, and scary. A lot of times I'm left feeling hollow and just plain confused. I guess it's a cultural disconnect as evidenced by the fact that none of the US remakes (besides The Ring) have had any real degree of success (Shutter, One Missed Call).
One thing about Asian horror movies, South Korean in general, is the insane amount of melodramatic plotlines. The motivations and machinations of everything in these movies is just absolutely dripping with the themes of love, friendship, loyalty, etc. So coming from a country whose entertainment is all about "shoot 'em up!" and "don't do that!" the change is quite jarring and sometimes frustrating.
But this shit is (can be) absolutely fucking beautiful and terrifying all at the same time.
Coming back to Ryeong after 7 years of not seeing it was almost like seeing it again for the first time. And I was extremely frustrated for at least the first 20 minutes.
Not to be racist, but everybody looks the fucking same. It makes understanding everything so much of a chore at times, so after 20 minutes of cracking my knuckles and yanking up the Wikipedia entry to try to get some grasp of just what the hell I was watching, I was soon being drawn into the story. And Jesus, it's nasty.
It starts at a sleepover, three girls playing with a Korean version of a Ouija board. They calli forth a ghost, the girls get themselves insanely freaked out when the ghost that they've conjured starts telling them it's in their room and out for revenge, the older sister of one of the girls, named Eun-Seo, sneaks into the room to scare the girls and forces them to go to bed. The younger sibling sad and put off by her older sister mutters that she wishes the ghost would terrorize her sister.
We later see this older sister in the kitchen begin choking on water and drowning to death.
This is where I started to get frustrated, we switch story lines to a girl named MIN Ji-Won, who I thought was maybe one of the girls from the beginning but apparently not as the previous event isn't even referenced for awhile.
The movie switches gears from a horror film to a sappy melodrama film about a girl who is suffering a severe case of amnesia. A sort-of boyfriend who is trying to win the heart of the girl who's main goal is to remember what happened to cause her memory loss.
She has decided that, since she cannot remember, she'll build a whole new life for herself, causing her mother to become a raging depressive. The woman feels abandoned since her husband died and now her amnesiac daughter is leaving her to study abroad.
The story actually begins to move at a brisk pace, the performances by the mother and Ji-Won are heartfelt and authentic. They are two women, feeling lost and adrift in life, clinging desperately to each other but pushing each other away at the same time.
Just as we settle into this switch, the director starts throwing in a smattering of eerie scenes to remind us that this is a horror movie also. Visions of ghosts, vivid dreams as Ji-Won starts to have memories triggered, a little girl hiding in a locker. It all begins to take on a sharp edge as Ji-Won's search for her missing life becomes desperate.
She is confronted one day by a former friend (one of the girl's from the seance scene earlier) to inform her that her older sister Eun-Soo was found drowned, another of their friends is in a mental hospital, and she herself is suffering from seeing things that aren't there. Ji-Won begins to interact with these girls from her forgotten past, gleaning any information about herself that she can before they are brutally killed, found with water in their lungs.
As Ji-Won begins to remember everything, she is confronted with the fact that, before the accident that caused her amnesia, she was kind of an egomaniacal cunt. A rich girl who looked down on those that were of a lower social class than her, and bullied a girl she was childhood friends with, a girl named Su-in.
Does Su-in hold the key to unlocking Ji-Won's memory?
You're torn as this girl who you were rooting for this whole time turns out to have been such an awful person in the past.
Kim Ha-Neul, the actress who plays Ji-Won, had me completely riveted throughout this film. She is a baby bird with a broken wing, struggling to find out who she was while being forced to become a woman at the same time, but lacking the necessary tools. And when she is attacked by a former friend for showing up at a funeral for another friend she doesn't remember, her pain is palpable, I felt for her. This woman portrays her character flawlessly, most of the acting done with facial expressions and minute gestures that renders spoken word almost unneccessary.
As the film progresses, you feel lost with Ji-Won. When a woman can't remember what happened herself, how can she trust the accounts of others in her life from a forgotten time? Are they telling the truth? Do they have something to hide from her? Does Ji-Won have something to hide from herself? Can she even trust her own mother? Can she trust her own mind?
Everything culminates in a drawn-out, full blown explanation with quick cuts to previous scenes in the movie, the perfect foreshadowing that is just jaw-dropping as the director gives you the puzzle pieces and helps nudge them into place. He doesn't spoon feed you everything, nor does he put a pretty ribbon on it, but he gives you just enough to grasp the hang of it yourself. And even once you think you've gotten it, the shit really hits the fan as everything you thought you knew is torn to shreds and the real story is revealed. And the final scene that had me cackling with the irony of the situation
This film has it all, guys: pretty Asian schoolgirls, vengeful ghosts, a twisted plot, amazing performances, hidden motives, and eerie shots, the fear lingering moreso in your mind than on the screen.
I ended up liking this movie a lot more than I thought I would considering how hesitant I felt with the opening sequence.
Rotten Tomatoes rating: 57% Audience approval
Drake Marcos Rating: 4 out of 5 swimming lessons
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