Dir.
Byeong-ki Ahn, 2002, South Korea, 100 mins
Cast: Ji-won Ha, Yu-mi Kim, Woo-jai Choi, Ji-yeon Choi
Following Gore Verbinski's recent remake of Hideo Nakata's Ring, American studios are already remaking Nakata's Dark Water and Takashi Shimizu's The Grudge with Sarah Michelle Gellar. The news is that they have already bought the rights for Ahn Byeung Ki's second horror feature, Phone, and are ready to give it the American remake treatment. This all seems rather unnecessary given that a number of the original films are already beginning to sample each other to the point of overlap and repetition.
Phone tells the story of Seo Ji-Won, an investigative journalist, who, after breaking the story on a paedophile ring, begins to receive threatening calls on her mobile. Her married friends, Ho-Jong (Yoo-Mi) and Chang-Hoon (Woo-Jae), insist that she stay at an empty house they own. She changes her mobile number, and while visiting an art gallery with Ho-Jong and her young daughter, Young-Ju (Seo-Woo), her phone starts ringing. The daughter innocently answers it and begins to scream uncontrollably. As Young-Ju's behaviour becomes increasingly strange and more violent (the doctors cannot find anything wrong with her), Ji-Won experiences some ghostly encounters involving a strange longhaired girl. Realising that everything began the day she changed her mobile number, she decides to investigate the number's previous owners. All but one have died in strange circumstances, and the original owner, a teenage girl called Jin-Hee (Ji-Yeon), has mysteriously vanished. As she finds out more about the girl's past, Ji-Won begins to believe that a secret lover may have murdered her, and that her spirit now haunts the mobile number. She also believes that Jin-Hee's spirit has possessed Young-Ju.
From the outset, Phone creates an atmosphere of dread in which something terrifying may happen at any given moment. Split into separate storylines the film follows Ji-Won's investigations into the disappearance of Jin-Hee (told with a flashback device which integrates Ji-Won into each occurrence), and the disturbances faced by the mother and father as their daughter, Young-Ju becomes possessed. Rather than concentrating fully on the importance of either story, the film is more a string of creepy, and occasionally very scary, moments. With a series of effective set pieces, the film can hold its own in the horror stakes. On a skin-crawling, visceral level, it works successfully. The photography (Moon Yong-Sik) and the sound design (Lee In-Kyu) work together beautifully, creating some buttock-clenching moments of fear out of very little. One scene, for instance, manages to conjure terror from a mobile phone set on vibrate as it growls across a schoolgirl's desk.
There is also something particularly disturbing about the performance from Seo-Woo as the possessed daughter. With minimal effort and in the blink of an eye, her face can contort from smiling innocence or childish grumpiness to gurning malice. At times, it is difficult to know whether the director is asking too much from an actress so young, with some scenes intended to show the daughter's evil urges coming off as just a touch comic. In one particular scene when she inappropriately kisses her father, the desired effect of sexual unease does not quite hit the mark in the way the director must have hoped for, coming off instead like she is having a particularly slobbery fit. Her performance, however, comes across as incredibly broad and brave for an actress of such a young age.
Phone joins a growing line of highly successful Asian horror films that have emerged in the last five years or so, providing the horror genre with an overdue and very welcome boost. What Phone does not manage to do, however, is extend the line any further, relying instead on elements that safely echo previous hits. A number of victims dying mysteriously after receiving phone calls; the ghost of an adolescent girl with long flowing dark hair; a terrifying encounter in a lift; finding clumps of hair in the house fittings; the search for a hidden corpse? Is any of this beginning to sound familiar?
With a generous scoop of Nakata's Ring, and Dark Water, and a liberal sprinkling of references to The Haunting, The Exorcist and What Lies Beneath, Phone is lumbered with an overwhelming and disappointing feeling of déjà vu.
Angus Macdonald
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