As much as I dislike the dismissal “if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all,” I have to admit, every now and then I run across a movie that makes me think “well, this is awfully familiar.” My inclination is to blame it on lazy filmmaking or producers desperate to cash in on something transiently popular. Am I being harsh? Probably a little, but every time a film falls back on familiar, well-word stories or plot devices or imagery, it tends to take me right out of it. Maybe it’s because I watch a lot of horror movies, but it especially bugs me there. Some people take comfort in familiar things in their entertainment and I’m not immune to or above that, I just don’t like it in horror. The last thing I want out of horror is to say “oh look, more ghosts with grossly distended features…yay.”
And this isn’t the biggest problem with Ogsuyeog Gwisin (The Ghost Station), but that’s mostly because it fumbles its third act. Otherwise, what you’d have is a pleasantly solid, but derivative Korean take on Japanese horror.
Na-young Kim is a reporter at a tabloid news site, and she is in both hot water and deep shit. She took a picture of a young woman in a subway station to present as the “It Girl” of the summer, and didn’t bother to get her consent. It gets more complicated as the “It Girl” turns out to have been a man cross-dressing, and now he’s suing the tabloid. Na-young is on the hook for a settlement that consists of an utterly bankrupting amount of money, and the tabloid’s going to leave her high and dry…unless she can put together some stories that will dramatically increase clicks and ad revenue. And, being a tabloid, the more sensational the better.
And just her luck, her brother works for public transportation, and he says one of his coworkers mentioned some mysterious deaths…the most recent in a whole series of them…at Ogsu Station. They think it’s cursed.
So what we have here is sort of a Korean attempt at the sort of films that would become known as “J-horror,” as the plucky young reporter sets out to uncover the explanation behind a bunch of unusual deaths, and ends up getting in way over her head. It’s definitely not afraid to borrow elements from
Ringu (an old well features prominently) and
Ju-On (creepy ghost kids), but in some ways this works to its advantage, because the borrowing ends up giving the film a solid narrative backbone in the form of a mystery that needs to be solved. Things unfold pretty nicely along those lines, with everything become gradually clearer as the film progresses and the gradual unfolding of the mystery providing an opportunity for the audience to put things together for themselves.
And there’s some interesting subtext too, in that Na-young isn’t really digging into this story because the truth must be told, at least not initially, it’s because she’s in trouble with her boss and if she doesn’t deliver, she’s ruined. So there’s something predatory about it, at least to start, which is sort of a refreshing twist on her character. She grapples at points with all of the death and buried secrets being greeted with more and more enthusiasm at work because they’re driving engagement like nobody’s business. Not to mention how the deeper she goes, the darker and weirder everything gets, and she sees things she absolutely cannot explain. There’s something malevolent here, but she has to keep putting herself in harm’s way because there’s a demand for coverage of this cursed station now, and it’s this or saying goodbye to her livelihood. It’s a nice departure from the hapless innocent.
And that’s about the only deviation from formula we’re going to get. The film gets off to a relatively slow start after an opening that feels a touch predictable (fairly standard “this place is haunted” shenanigans that end up with someone dead) but does settle into a groove in the second act with some nice startling moments paying off in ways that aren’t especially telegraphed. Again, it’s nothing fancy – this film has one gear, and that’s Na-young or her brother poking their nose where they aren’t supposed to, talking to people that they don’t realize are dead, and then boom! Creepy ghost jump-scare. I don’t normally like jump-scares, but the filmmakers know better than to set them up so you see them coming a mile away. They’re sharp and crisp and punctuate the unfolding revelations of what happened on this land long before the station was build, and how some things just cannot be buried.
But then we get to the third act. It’s not a gigantic off-the-rails clusterfuck or anything. Again, this film is resolutely on rails. In fact, by the third act it’s clear that it’s going to keep going back to the same well (ha-ha) over and over again based on what was established in the second act, and so what was working really well to add a certain amount of eeriness and tension threatens to become predictable. And then at the climax, instead of bringing it to some kind of end, they focus on an element to the story that was barely addressed in the first two acts. It feels like the filmmakers realized that they either didn’t have an ending, still had twenty minutes to come up with so it could be feature-length, or maybe both. The result feels like the third act is tacked on, as if they’d forgotten about part of the story and decided to deal with it all at once instead of weaving into the first two acts.
The result is that instead of the film wrapping up and coming to a satisfying close, it sort of veers into something that doesn’t really feel organic to the overall story. Worse, it doesn’t do as much with it as it could have– there are elements to it that could tie really nicely into existing story elements, but it contents itself with sort of sputtering out in an end with a fraction of the impact it could have had. Despite having its moments, ultimately it just feels like an assemblage of parts.
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