As the old saying goes, the only inevitable things in life are death and taxes. But people have certainly been known to cheat on their taxes, and the desire to cheat death isn’t far behind. Maybe we aren’t ready to go, maybe we aren’t ready for someone else to go, and in fiction the things we’ll do to prevent it from happening usually do not end well. There’s something fundamentally unnatural about it, lingering when you shouldn’t.
And that’s the beating heart of Geung See (Rigor Mortis). It’s a haunting, beautifully realized story about the time we have left to us, however we feel about it.
It opens, fittingly enough, at the end of something. Two people slumped against the wall across the room from each other, there’s a big pool of blood there. It doesn’t look like either of them is long for this world, and there’s a voiceover talking about the ridiculousness of life. The “I suppose you’re wondering how I got here” is unspoken, and we cut to some time before, as Siu-Ho, a washed-up movie actor, is moving into a run-down apartment block in some backwater nowhere. It’s an enormous, brutalist tower, practically a city unto itself. We don’t know much about why he’s there, though impressionistic flashbacks suggest he’s a man who’d grown apart from his wife and child. The apartment’s already mostly furnished - things left over from the previous tenants, who left some time ago and the unit hasn’t been rented since.
But as he soon discovers, it isn’t exactly empty, either.
Siu-Ho’s arrival places him right in the middle of the lives of a bunch of people dealing with the liminal space between life and death - people who see ghosts, people who see their death coming and are trying to outrun it, people visited all too quickly by death, desperately trying to undo it, people who used to hunt ghosts for a living and have nothing left to do, and people who try to embrace death only to be rejected. It mixes horror with the sort of grungy urban fantasy also depicted in films like
Heartless and
Night Watch. It’s a world where spirits inhabit monolithic tenements right along with the residents and where ghosts are both literal and metaphorical, both restless spirits and traumatic memories.
There’s a sense of worlds coexisting - the ancient and the modern, the living and the dead, the practical and the magical. There’s the cranky old man who runs the restaurant on the ground floor of the building - the one who knows everyone’s orders by heart, and has arcane tools and equipment gathering dust in his apartment. There’s the kindly old woman who mends everyone’s clothes (even though she isn’t very good at it) and the things she’s willing to do for love, and the mysterious older gentleman who helps her, who has a nasty cough he can only soothe with something taken from old clay pots. There’s the young homeless woman and her son, living in the margins, seeing the dead behind the apartment door. They aren’t pretending to be one thing while really being another, they’re both at the same time. There’s no real separation between the different worlds, and there’s a feeling of acceptance or maybe even fatalism about it - this is just how it is. This is what it means to live, this is what it means to die. The whole film has a mournful and elegiac tone to it, from the beginning to the very end, a sense of seeing the end coming and waiting patiently for it to get here.
A lot of this comes through in the visuals. It’s shot in a largely desaturated palette - even the occasional flashbacks, though somewhat more colorful, are still largely soft golden tones or brightly white in sharp contrast to a present that ranges from muddy, drab colors to an ashen gray that’s almost oppressive. Often the film seems monochromatic, with the only real color coming from blood and flame. And it’s not just the cinematography that’s visually stunning, there are also a number of highly evocative sequences that express the more fantastic side of this world in dreamlike imagery where the world bends and softens into someplace else, or in vivid flashbacks, or striking visual metaphor. Even little details, like the furnishings of a home sketched onto a boiler room wall with chalk, tell you about this world as much as the more dramatic set pieces, which are consistently good and inventive. Though it was made in 2013, you wouldn’t know it to look at it.
And where the visuals are doing so much heavy lifting, the rest of the film shows a certain amount of restraint. The music is minimal, mostly ambience that adds to a feeling without being intrusive. You feel it more than you hear it. And as always, there’s something lost in the translation of the dialogue, but not too much, and the performances are generally pretty low-key and believable. This is not a histrionic film, it's one pitched at everyday conversation, the banter between people who’ve known each other for a long time, whether friends or not, the shorthand of long-married couples. So it feels grounded in a way that helps give the fantastic elements more gravitas. They feel more like people than characters for the most part, so when things start to go bad, there’s real pathos there - these are lives being destroyed, not characters getting bumped off.
There’s a lot going on here, but it never feels cluttered or overstuffed - there’s dark fantasy, a few wuxia action sequences, and a lot of flat-out horror, surprisingly violent at that, and though I wouldn’t call it gratuitous, it definitely goes to some very upsetting places. But it all fits together damn near seamlessly. Honestly, I don’t have much bad to say about this, it does get a little confusing at points toward the end, but not by much, and it ends strong on a deeply mournful note that brings everything back full circle. It’s a good start to the new year.
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