Day 2: PHONE (2002)

Back in 2005, Phone was one of a slew of East Asian films to hit the Western market thanks to Tartan Asia Extreme DVD. While some were lauded and deemed instant classics, such as A Tale of Two Sisters, The Eye, and Ringu, many more were (fairly or not) relegated to the "eh, it's more of the same stuff" pile and left there--and unlike their more famous brethren, most have yet to earn a home release since that Tartan DVD.

I was quite taken with Phone way back in 2005, so much so that I didn't really get into specifics about it--rather, I just told folks to go watch it. While last night was the first time I watched it since that lofty "review," I'd certainly thought about it from time to time, though all I really thought about (or even remembered) was the performance of young Eun Seo-woo as Yeong-ju, a girl who gets possessed. I couldn't remember why she got possessed, or by whom or what. The circumstances, the plot, all of it washed away by time! But her acting--by turns adorable, terrified, and terrifying--remained in my brain place. And while I was taken with the entire film (I see why I recommended it in The Olde Days), Eun Seo-woo's performance is still the highlight. She's just straight-up terrific and gives some of the most delightful stank faces I've ever seen.

Thanks to the work of intrepid reporter (be still my heart!) Ji-won (Ha Ji-won), several men are charged and arrested for sex crimes involving underage girls. Soon after she receives a series of incresaingly threatening phone calls and stalking incidents, prompting her to relocate for a while to a house owned by childhood friend Ho-jeong (Kim Yu-mi) and her husband Chang-hoon (Choi Woo-jae). One evening, Ji-won's laptop goes all The Matrix-looking and a phone number appears on the screen. Ji-won starts receiving indecipherable calls and text messages from the same number. Whilst unattended, Ho-jeong's daughter Yeong-ju answers one of these calls to Ji-won's phone and begins acting very strangely--she also seems to harbor an obsessive (and way beyond inappropriate) attachment to her father Chang-hoon. 

Plot threads and time tangle and disentangle as we learn the story of the voice on the other end of the cell phone and the victims who have come before while the fates of Ji-won and her dear ones lie in the balance. There are ghostly presences, disturbing imagery, and some genuinely chilling sequences throughout a narrative that twists and turns and then twists and turns some more; As mysteries get solved and questions get answered, Phone might rely a bit too much on flashbacks to fill us in, but this is a fairly standard structure for Asian horror--particularly Korean horror--and I don't mind it a whit. As also expected from a K-horror feature, there's some high melodrama and a lot of melancholy tied to a kind of depressing inevitability to events. I ain't complainin'!

I ain't complainin' about none of it, in fact. Phone looks fantastic, with more intriguing visuals and color palettes at play than many of its (often kinda cheap-looking) DV-era contemporaries. Blessedly there's only one or two decidedly 2002 CGI shots, and they're not ghost-related. 

It's no surprise that director/co-writer Ahn Byeong-ki (Apt, Nightmare, and the Bunshinsaba series) cites Hideo Nakata's Ringu as an influence for Phone, particularly during the film's climactic sequence--and honestly, the ghost's big moment is a pretty worthy successor to Sadako emerging from the television if you ask me. And speaking of that ghost, oooh it is angry and vengeful! Not only against the ones who did it wrong, but against...kind of anyone, really, including the poor, random souls who happened upon the cell phone by happenstance. 

Phone doesn't dive as deep into the realm of "hey, what's up with this new technology and should we be afraid of it...?" as films like Pulse (aka Kairo) and One Missed Call do--here, the phone feels more akin to a Ouija board or a séance or that kind of horror movie trope of yore. But still, the cell phone was still a fairly new commonplace technology at the time, and it's fun to watch the ways Ahn uses it to inflict terror on his characters.

So yeah man, this one still holds up--not only thanks to the work of Eun Seo-woo, but because it's just some solid Korean horror, you know? Sometimes that's the only thing that hits just right, and hit just right it did. Here's hoping it eventually enters the modern media age and gets some love (beyond me posting about it every 20 years).