Phone
Byeong-Ki Ahn, Raindance Film Festival 2003

Emilie Bickerton

This second feature film from the Korean director, Byeong-Ki Ahn, never quite escapes the limited effect of using technology as the source of horror.

The mobile phone that haunts a young reporter, Ji-won (Ji-won Ha) by ringing and making an abominable sound as she answers, is ultimately inanimate. You could always switch the phone off, or throw it away: this basic objection is not challenged here, and that hampers the film's credibility. For any genuinely scary movie, you can't feel more intelligent than the victims: you surely have to believe that the same terrible events could happen to you, and you just wouldn't know what to do.

In contrast to Phone, Hideo Nakata's The Ring (the original version, 1998) was haunting in the unnatural transgression between human and technological worlds (the video, the television screen), and showed an autonomous power developing in technology. But the real horror was still what lay beneath; what human action was responsible for it all. Phone finds rather banal explanations - infidelity, jealousy and revenge - that are too unlikely to be genuinely disturbing, and there is no organic link between technological horror and human horror.

All the tropes for a horror movie are here: the bright young reporter in an empty house, the dark corridors lined with mirrors and portraits that follow you with their eyes. These are superficially frightening but not disturbing. Most affecting is Yeong-Ju (Seo-Wu-Eun), the young child who hears the terrible sounds on the phone and becomes (another trope) possessed by the caller's vengeful spirit. She, at least, is genuinely terrifying, with her white eyes and startling ability to switch from sweet to sinister in a second. She is also part of the most intriguing scene in this otherwise two-dimensional film.

Sitting on her bed, reading a story with her mother about princesses and happiness, her mother falls asleep. Yeong-Ju continues to read, 'and the scene went black'- the director obeys, and the screen momentarily flashes black - 'and they lived happily ever after'.

Disgusted at this glib ending, the possessed child throws away the book, swearing at the rubbish kids are fed, 'Is anyone surprised we grow up disappointed by the world?' It is a moment of self-referential film-making, and bitter social cynicism, so much cleverer than the rest that it belongs in another movie.