Voices (2007)

Kim Ga-in (Jin-seo Yoon) is a popular high school student and a member of the fencing team.  Her parents are successful, she has a boyfriend (Ki-woo Lee) who appears to be on an upward career path and everything seems to be going her way.  Only, per parents are worried.  They see a number of murders happening on television, all for fairly minor events, and are afraid that their family may be under some curse which will make them next.

As if to underscore this, Ga-in's aunt takes a tumble off a second-story balcony on her wedding day.  She survives, only to be killed by her own sister in the hospital.  Afterward, several people, from an intelligent but put-upon fellow student to a teacher to her own mother, try to kill Ga-in for unknown reasons.

The only person who seems to know what is going on Sung-min (Gi-woong Park), a new boy at school that it is rumored murdered his father.  He tells Ga-in not to trust anyone, not even herself.  When she goes looking for reasons why the things around her are occurring he takes her to meet Dae-yong Hwang (Jin-geun Kim), a man who murdered his wife at the slight urging of a voice over the phone that she was unfaithful.  Hwang, filled with guilt all his life, spent the better part of it searching for the person who urged him on - only to be taunted by the same person as time went on.

Returning home, Ga-in finds that her mother has recovered and things might be returning to normal.  However, she still finds it difficult to trust, and for good reason - someone close to her has been plotting revenge against her and her family all along, and she may not be as innocent as she seems.

This surprised me that it popped up from After Dark, especially since like Frontiére(s) it is a movie made on its own for a foreign market that largely puts most of the movies produced for the After Dark series to shame.  Largely I was impressed because instead of going for a huge body count the film dealt with deeper issues, such as jealousy, survivor guilt and how close to the edge we can get before our own petty jealousies push us over.  Voices explores all this wonderfully for two thirds of the movie.

Although I felt it had an exciting denouement, I was disappointed that it went for, at least as far as Asian horror films do, a traditional ending.  Various points fold on each other, some of it defying even the internal logic of the movie itself, finally ending on a note that doesn't completely invalidate the issues that came before but instead cheapens them to provide a typical supernatural horror villain.  It's not creepy girls with long hair for once, but it is still more explanation than the film really needed.  If there is one movie that needed a vague ending it was this one.

Still, don't let the After Dark moniker scare you, as this is largely well-acted and well-done.  It is also nice not to see any little girl ghosts for once.

Voices (2007)
Time: 85 minutes
Starring: Jin-seo yoon
Director: Ki-hwan Oh

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Lawnmower Man (1992)

Image
Virtual reality has been one of the most hyped, and one of the most disappointing, promises of technology.  While it promotes immersion into a cybernetic world what it really provides are video games with 20-year-old graphics and the occasional bruise when one accidentally hits a closet door.  In the case of The Lawnmower Man  what it is promising is that something with graphics just a little bit better than Dire Straits's "Money for Nothing" video will somehow change the world and alter humanity. It was laughable then and it is laughable now.  The only person not laughing was Stephen King, who demanded that his name be removed from all future advertising for the movie because he never wrote this.  The story, of which a short film was made in the 1980s, involves a man unwittingly hiring a Greek god to mow his lawn and, after said god creates a spectacle, paying for the landscaping with his life.  It's only a few pages and, in my opinion, it is one of King's worst
Read more

Things (1989)

Image
Most of the time when I hear a movie is the worst ever I know that is hyperbole. There are few candidates and I would even say the famous book chronicling the worst movies ever made got it wrong.  Plan 9 from Outer Space is laughably incompetent, but enjoyable.  The worst kind of films are the ones where no joy can be found in the watching experience, for reasons ranging from unlikeable characters to just sheer boredom.  A truly horrible movie is something like  Things.   This is a 1989 direct-to-video horror film from Canada, filmed on 8mm and dubbed once it was completed and the makers realized most of the sound was unusable.  Director Andrew Jordan and writer Barry J. Gillis managed to grab porn star Amber Lynn for an hour to shoot her as a news reporter just so they could put her face on the video box.  Most of the music was done by Gillis, and some of it by a local band called Familiar Strangers.  It was filmed in large part in Andrew Norman's basement, and most of the props w
Read more

The Omen (1976)

Image
A movie does not have to be high art to strike a chord with the public.  The Omen was an attempt by writer David Seltzer to make some money and get a nice trip to the UK.  It just so happened that because of The Exorcist the public was hungry for more movies involving demons and such, and adding a veneer of Catholicism didn't hurt either.  The Vatican's secrets are most likely of more interest to scholars than anyone else, but a religion doesn't hang on over the centuries without creating a bit of mystery.  In this case, Seltzer settled on the Revelation of St. John, the low-fantasy portion of the Bible and, instead of an hilariously named (albeit historically correct) demon named Pazuzu, with The Omen we get the son of Satan himself.  When Robert Thorne (Gregory Peck) is informed that his child has died he visits a priest at the hospital in Rome where his wife is coalescing.  He is given an offer too good to be true: a foundling, whose mother died in childbirth, was born
Read more