Voices (Horrorfest): Review
This South Korean thriller also known as "Someone Behind You" or "Du Saramida (Two People)".
In the film, Ka-in (Yun Jin-seo, Old Boy) is a high school student, adept at fencing, with loving parents, a pretty younger sister and a hunky med-student boyfriend (Yi Ki-woo, Tale of Cinema). Everything seems to be perfect, until one day her aunt suffers a terrible accident on her wedding day. She is then graphically stabbed to death by another aunt while hospitalized. Reeling from shock, Ka-in soon finds herself the target of the inexplicable murderous rage of her friends and even family members. To figure out what is going on, she enlists the help of a creepy classmate Seok-min (Park Ki-woong, The Art of Fighting).
"Someone Behind You" is based on a comic book by Kang Kyung-ok, which apparently is a straightforward supernatural thriller, attributing the cause of Ka-in's horrendous situation to a family curse (naturally, the curse descends down through the agnatic lineage, this being a Korean one). The movie version dabbles with that premise, then abandons it altogether and turns itself into a far-fetched murder mystery, finally resolving into a yet another rip-off of Tale of Two Sisters, with a chunk bitten off from Death Note thrown in for a good measure.
To put it charitably, Someone's screenplay is a mess. Penned by five scribes including the director, Lee Shin-ae, who previously wrote Fox Stairs, and Lee Hyo-chul, responsible for Hanbando (?!), it is a dreadful mishmash of different agendas and styles, without any coherent sense of what it's groping for. Adding insult to injury is Oh Ki-hwan's (Last Present, shudder…) lugubrious direction, which tiredly follows one set-up after another. Particularly harebrained is the character of Min-seok: the last-minute revelation regarding him is totally predictable but is nonetheless a hoot. I can easily imagine Korean moviegoers rolling their eyes and hurling insults at the close-up of him grinning sinisterly in that eyebrow-obscuring gappa hairstyle.
Nearly wasted are two excellent actresses, Yun Jin-seo as Ka-in and Kim So-eun (The Show Must Go On) as her sister. Yun is basically given an impossible role to play, a young girl against whom the whole world has turned murderous, but she pulls it off without ever relying on histrionics, even under the overtly melodramatic direction given by director Oh. Kim is ridiculously cute but shows a lot of potential. The interactions between these two actresses are frankly the only believable part of the movie. While Someone gets a few goodwill points by staying away from long-haired Sadako clones, as a thriller or horror film it is simply lame, not even unintentionally funny to qualify as camp entertainment. Should be of interest only for those fans of Yun Jin-seo and Kim So-eun who don't mind their favorite actresses put through the wringer in almost sadistically unimaginative ways.
Reviewed by Kyu Hyun Kim (Koreanfilm.org)
In the film, Ka-in (Yun Jin-seo, Old Boy) is a high school student, adept at fencing, with loving parents, a pretty younger sister and a hunky med-student boyfriend (Yi Ki-woo, Tale of Cinema). Everything seems to be perfect, until one day her aunt suffers a terrible accident on her wedding day. She is then graphically stabbed to death by another aunt while hospitalized. Reeling from shock, Ka-in soon finds herself the target of the inexplicable murderous rage of her friends and even family members. To figure out what is going on, she enlists the help of a creepy classmate Seok-min (Park Ki-woong, The Art of Fighting).
"Someone Behind You" is based on a comic book by Kang Kyung-ok, which apparently is a straightforward supernatural thriller, attributing the cause of Ka-in's horrendous situation to a family curse (naturally, the curse descends down through the agnatic lineage, this being a Korean one). The movie version dabbles with that premise, then abandons it altogether and turns itself into a far-fetched murder mystery, finally resolving into a yet another rip-off of Tale of Two Sisters, with a chunk bitten off from Death Note thrown in for a good measure.
To put it charitably, Someone's screenplay is a mess. Penned by five scribes including the director, Lee Shin-ae, who previously wrote Fox Stairs, and Lee Hyo-chul, responsible for Hanbando (?!), it is a dreadful mishmash of different agendas and styles, without any coherent sense of what it's groping for. Adding insult to injury is Oh Ki-hwan's (Last Present, shudder…) lugubrious direction, which tiredly follows one set-up after another. Particularly harebrained is the character of Min-seok: the last-minute revelation regarding him is totally predictable but is nonetheless a hoot. I can easily imagine Korean moviegoers rolling their eyes and hurling insults at the close-up of him grinning sinisterly in that eyebrow-obscuring gappa hairstyle.
Nearly wasted are two excellent actresses, Yun Jin-seo as Ka-in and Kim So-eun (The Show Must Go On) as her sister. Yun is basically given an impossible role to play, a young girl against whom the whole world has turned murderous, but she pulls it off without ever relying on histrionics, even under the overtly melodramatic direction given by director Oh. Kim is ridiculously cute but shows a lot of potential. The interactions between these two actresses are frankly the only believable part of the movie. While Someone gets a few goodwill points by staying away from long-haired Sadako clones, as a thriller or horror film it is simply lame, not even unintentionally funny to qualify as camp entertainment. Should be of interest only for those fans of Yun Jin-seo and Kim So-eun who don't mind their favorite actresses put through the wringer in almost sadistically unimaginative ways.
Reviewed by Kyu Hyun Kim (Koreanfilm.org)
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