WHISPERING CORRIDORS (1998)
"Empty classrooms give me the creeps."
2 out of ****
Original Title: Yeogo Goedam; Starring Lee Mi-Youn, Kim Kyu-Li, Lee Yong-Nyu, Kim Yoo-Suk, Choi Sae-Yun, Park Yong-Su; Directed by Park Ki-Hyung; Written by Park & In Jung-Ok; Cinematography by Suh Jung-Min
WHISPERING CORRIDORS is a South Korean horror movie which avoids the blatant tactics of most contemporary horror movies, but replaces them with mere competence. There are well-crafted sequences featuring darkened rooms, billowing white drapes, long pregnant silences, elusive restless spirits, abnormal phenomena, and sudden bursts of bloody violence. But it is no more than craftmanship. It doesn't generate the desired frisson of dread, doesn't scare the hell of us, and so it doesn't succeed.
The action takes place entirely within the walls of an all-girls Korean high school, which, unlike the high schools I attended, seems eerily deserted even during school hours. One morning, two students discover the body of a middle-aged teacher unaffectionately known as Old Fox. She seems to have committed suicide by hanging, but we know better: the opening sequence shows her murder at the hands of a ghost.
As events progress, we piece together the history of the ghost: she is the spirit of Jin-Ju, a girl who attended the school a decade ago and has not yet departed. Jin-Ju was stifled in her creativity and passions, and she committed suicide. The room where she took her own life is now off-limits. Aspects of Jin-Ju's experiences seem to be reflected in the lives of several students in a senior class, each troubled in her own way, including a strange loner, an aspiring artist, her melancholy friend, and the ace student of the class. One of the teachers, former student Eun-Young, was Jin-Ju's best friend, and tries to resolve the haunting before more deaths occur.
The villain of the piece, however, is not Jin-Ju but Mr. Oh--or Mad Dog, as his students call him. He is a hyperbolic authoritarian who, having apparently missed his calling in life as a drill sergeant, hurls invective at the girls, telling them that they must consider their classmates as enemies if they are to achieve good grades. Not content with verbal abuse, he strikes girls who break the rules. He makes advances on others, toying intimately with their hair.
Mad Dog, despite being caricatured as a swaggering overgrown schoolyard bully, is a suitable focus for the film's anger, which is directed toward the education system, of which both Jin-Ju and the present-day students are victims. After a strikingly savage incident involving one of the girls--who, like Jin-Ju, has artistic inclinations--Mad Dog has become a genuinely hateful figure. Then, in a prime example of the movie's maladroit handling of narrative development, he becomes the ghost's next victim, effectively eliminating the antagonist halfway through. The movie founders from then on, trying to mount a climax which will make us both afraid of Jin-Ju's ghost and sympathetic to her adolescent need for friendship and acceptance.
WHISPERING CORRIDORS is overtly concerned with the stifling effect that the school's rules have on the girls, who must curb their tendencies to act in anything other than a respectable manner. Outside the class, they swear and smoke and pierce their noses; they paint disturbing pictures and listen to rock music. Within the classroom, they sit in ordered rows, demure and deferential in their staid school uniforms. The ghost story is an apt vehicle for the notion that the repressive atmosphere of the classroom, and perhaps of South Korean society at large, results in dangerous outbursts of uncontained desires, as embodied by Jin-Ju's acts of violence, which are, ultimately, the acts of a confused and insecure young woman.
Less obviously, and perhaps unintentionally, the movie also explores the girls' developing sexuality: it is inevitable that a movie featuring adolescent girls and repeated shots of dripping blood is, on some level, a dramatization of menarche and female sexual self-knowledge. There is also the barest hint of a suggestion that the "friendship" that Jin-Ju seeks is not Platonic, but the movie sidesteps the issue--perhaps enforcing the very codes of repression it criticizes.
If the subtexts of the movie are far more intriguing than the ostensible story, that's because it is transparent and ineffectual as horror. One problem is the heavy-handed use of frequent close-ups of trembling-lipped, teary-eyed women as a substitute for emotional subtlety. Another problem is that it tries to be an ensemble drama, rather than providing us with a central viewpoint character. Consequently, the ghost of Jin-Ju is not seen as a dominant force in one person's life, but rather remains a peripheral presence impacting on several lives. We learn about her in flashbacks and inferences, and, kept at a distance, it is difficult to either fear her or empathize with her. She suffers the same problem in the movie as she did in life: she is marginalized when she should be the centre of attention.
Subjective Camera (subjective.freeservers.com) Movie Reviews by David Dalgleish (daviddalgleish@yahoo.com)
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