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Voice
Stop lying to yourself! -or- Paper cut!
2005
Review: January 19, 2010
Director: Ik-hwan Choe
Starring: Ok-bin Kim, Ji-hye Seo, Ye-ryeon Cha, Seo-hyeong Kim
Hey, now that you mention it…
THE SETUP:
Girl is killed, haunts her school, only her best friend can hear her voice.
DISCUSSION:
My friend recommended this, saying he thought it was okay at first, but stayed with him for a while, as, we agreed, Korean horror is wont to do. A little research reveals that this is actually the fourth film in the Whispering Corridors series, and considered one of the better ones. Okay, so let’s get on with it.
We are in a high school after hours, during which time the administrators apparently decided a scheme of blood-red security lights would be most appropriate, just like hospitals in horror films think it best to have only one sputtering fluorescent light on, wayyy down the hall. Our heroine, Young-eon, is practicing her singing in the music room. Her best friend, Sun-min, has been waiting for her so they can go out and tip cows, but Young-eon REALLY needs to practice some more, so she sends her friend away. She’s done practicing three minutes later, and wanders around the red, creepy hall. A sheet of music paper floats around the hallway, gathers velocity, and slices Young-eon right in the throat. Ouch, paper cut! So she dies.
The next day she wakes at the school, and soon realizes that no one can hear or see her, and you know what that means—no homework! But also no food or social contact, so that’s a bummer. Turns out she also can’t go outside. When she tries, she just ends up back in the school. But it seems that Sun-min can hear her voice, which she is more than a little freaked out by at first. But eventually she comes around and they start trying to figure out what happened to Young-eon.
It occurred to me while watching this that one of the effects Asian horror films have in the pocket that their American remakes can never replicate is to have large groups of people—well, it would sound racist to say “who all look the same”—what I mean is who all have straight black hair and wear the same outfit. And these films use the effect to the hilt, to generally good results.
Anyway, there’s something suspicious about the music teacher. Most notably, that she walks around as though she’s in a coma. Of course, there’s nothing unusual about this in an Asian horror film. She seems freaked and has a nasty scar on her neck, and we soon find out that Young-eon had a mother that went insane and went into an institution, and she turned for comfort to her music teacher, who she snuggled with and said “You smell like my mother.” That night, the two girls sneak around the school after hours, and find the music teacher hung! Gossip immediately starts that she was a lesbian, and that she and Young-eon, who is just considered absent that day, were lovers. It goes without saying in this film that if you are lesbian, you ARE sad and depressed and killing yourself is quite a natural solution.
SPOILERS > > >
But wait, there’s another girl! This is Cho-ah, who is sort of a Korean burnout, sneaking cigarettes outside on the roof and such. She befriends Sun-min, confides that she hears voices too, and that they’re the voices of the dead. She says that only the closest to the dead person can hear them, and if you forget the dead person, they really die.
So around now you see that Young-eon is getting an unofficial tour of her memories, like all of a sudden she’s back with her mom outside the institution, and a while later is with her mom at the top of the institution while she jumps to her death. Then she’s back in the music room, and realizes someone else was there… and it was Cho-ah! The one who is now befriending Sun-min, telling her to forget Young-eon! You see, Cho-ah was the music teacher’s little protégé, and the music teacher was her surrogate mother, but then the music teacher realized that Young-eon had the SAME voice, so she started to favor her, leaving Cho-ah out in the cold… it all starts getting very confusing, with a million billion little ‘buts’ and ‘and thens,’ and this is before we even got into the lesbian affair that the music teacher really was having, but with Cho-ah. I have to say that right about here is where there just started being so many complications that I just gave up and stopped paying attention or trying to figure out what was happening.
So Young-eon and Sun-min are hanging out in the school after hours when they get in the elevator, which takes them down to the middle of nowhere—no, I mean NOWHERE, they are literally surrounded by blackness and apparently in some sort of fifth dimension—when something is coming at them! It comes, and comes, and finally get close, and they scream! Then the door opens and they’re back upstairs. What was it that lunged at them? Well, could be any number of things, really, none of which we’ll ever find out about. Then—they find Young-eon’s body on top of the elevator! Soon after, Sun-min is starting to believe all the sass talk Cho-ah has to say about Young-eon, like that she is holding Young-eon back from getting on with her afterlife, and starts to ignore Young-eon when she speaks. She also—now you know there’s no turning back—deletes her picture from her computer desktop!
Anyway, now the movie turns into revelationapalooza, as every moment seemingly reveals some dark hidden secret that causes you to rethink everything you THOUGHT you knew! So there’s some bullshit I could not follow AT ALL about how, like, there’s ANOTHER ghost in the school, and the music teacher was using Young-eon to replace Cho-ah, who killed herself because of their lesbian relationship, but before that asked Young-eon not to steal the music teacher away, to which Young-eon was like “Piss off, Godzilla-face,” then Young-eon sees that it was HER that pushed her mom off the hospital roof, and then courted the music teacher, then HUNG the music teacher [with her psychic ghostly powers, apparently] and—you know, whatever. Where are the dragons? If we’re just going to throw everything and the kitchen sink into a movie, I want some dragons. And giant, marauding burritos. At this point, why not?
During part of this, Young-eon is facing HERSELF, telling HERSELF all the shocking revelations, which made it terribly amusing to me when she said “You’re lying to yourself!” It made me think that in American or European horror, you can pretty much be sure that the hero will not turn out to ALSO be the killer, and that most times, characters who others can see and hear will, in most cases, turn out to be alive. Not so in Asian horror! All bets are off. The other thing, Cho-ah is seen and reacted to by several of the living, but apparently has been dead the whole time? I give up. Anyway, some other bullshit happens, and eventually it ends.
< < < SPOILERS END
Remember that feeling when you were back in school and it was all “Lucy sells lemonade at $1 a quart, which requires 18 lemons, that cost $2.25 a dozen…” and you think about it for two seconds then think “You know, I don’t give a FUCK about Lucy and her stupid entrepreneurial efforts!” That’s how I ended up feeling about this movie. I’m sure if I sat down and studied it for three hours and made graphs and charts of all the characters and their pasts and futures and studied Korean ghost folklore and mapped it to plots of the other three movies in this series I could figure it out, but you know, I don’t really give a shit. Plus, I doubt very much that the answer would really be all that interesting, or reward my efforts. So you go to hell, Voice!
It was somewhat interesting for the first two-thirds, but there are a lot of other Asian horror things that are interesting and actually turn out to make sense in the end… A Tale of Two Sisters, for instance. There are decent scares and creeps in this movie—but pretty much the same ones as there are in virtually every Asian horror movie. So ultimately I guess I have to say give this movie a pass. It’s not bad—it just that there are a lot of other movies out there that do the exact same thing, but better.
OH WAIT, MORE SPOILERS > > >
So I ended up doing a little bit of the research I said I didn’t care enough to do, and found out the deelio. Turns out the thing rushing at Sun-min in the elevator was Young-eon’s ghost, who effectively possessed her BFF and stole her life, which makes a lot more sense of why she was talking to herself at the end. As my friend who explained it to me said “It turns out the DVD cover graphic of the person coming OUT of the other’s mouth was the exact opposite of what happened.” Okay, so it makes more sense but… I guess these Koreans really have a lot of time to sit around obsessing over all the many story wrinkles of these movies, huh?
< < < SUPPLEMENTARY SPOILERS END
So there are two South Korean women at work and I always report whatever Korean movie I’ve watched to them, and they gave me some interesting insights as to where this one might have originated from. Apparently, like in Japan, in Korea you MUST get into college, or be doomed to a horrible, low-wage life. So the schools are very intensely competitive and high-pressure, and my friend said growing up at least one girl killed herself every year. There is also urban legends about the second-ranked girl killing the top-ranked girl. Because of this, girls’ high schools are seen as creepy, haunted places filled with ghosts. So this puts a lot of perspective on this story. Apparently this series is incredibly popular in Korea [they’re on number five as of this writing] and all young female stars are desperate to get a part in one. Huh, fascinating.
SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?
No, watch A Tale of Two Sisters.
