|
 i-ju
is not having a very good life. For one, she's no
longer in love with her job teaching cello to a
bunch of spoiled brats, one of whom holds a grudge
against her and may be trying to run her over with
a car. At home, Mi-ju's oldest (and very strange)
daughter is learning to play the cello, and doing
a terrible job of it. And then there's her
amazingly uncharismatic fiancé, who just hired a
housekeeper who may just be the creepiest
housekeeper to ever go into business of cleaning
house. Plus, I'm pretty sure that cello her
daughter is playing is haunted. Such is life for
the heroine of a Korean horror movie.
Of course matters aren't
helped by the inescapable fact that first-time
writer/director Woo-cheol Lee's "Cello"
is simply unconcern with being even a semi
credible horror movie. For example, the film's
first 30 minutes only features one appearance of a
long-haired female ghost, and even then it's a
blink-and-you'll-never-know-she-was-there moment.
What's the world coming to when you can't even
pick up a Korean horror movie and see a
long-haired female ghost for more than a few
seconds? Why, I remember the day when horror
movies were horror movies, not faux family
melodrama dressed up to resemble horror. In the
spirit of "
South
Park
", I call "Shenanigans" on
"Cello"!
But I digress.
"Cello" follows the
uninspired, uninteresting, and unintentionally
humorous life of Mi-ju (Hyeon-a Seong, "The
Scarlet Letter"), a cello professor who
now leads a life of -- well, I'm not really sure
what she does now except drive her car a lot. What
matters is that Mi-ju bears a scar from a car
accident that killed her best friend, a tragedy
that forced Mi-ju to give up her cello career. As
to why -- well, the film is peculiar about this,
and seems strangely uninterested in telling us the
origins of the scar until almost the hour mark.
You'd think such an important plot point like the
lead character's best friend dying, prompting her
to give up her precious cello career, and go into
seclusion was something you might want to divulge
to the audience, say, before an hour has passed in
your 90-minute movie, but maybe it's just me.
It's very obvious that
"Cello" has interests that don't jive
with the interests of the people who will be
seeing it. The film clearly has ambition, wanting
to be something more than just a "Korean
horror movie". Unfortunately, this desire to
be what it isn't, or what it's selling itself as,
translates into a poor genre film that, although
it is different in most respects from the usual
crop of Asian horror, is nevertheless simply not
worth 90 minutes of your time to sit through. If
movies were bookends, "Cello" would be
gathering dust at the end of the library,
perfectly satisfied to never have been used. It's
simply just…there. There is some mild perverse
joy to be had towards the end as the story finally
starts to move, but it's not worth sitting through
the rest of the movie for.
Fortunately "Cello"
has some humor in it, albeit the unintentional
kind. For instance, it's quite amusing to watch
"Cello" just to see how creepy the
people around Mi-ju are. Her eldest daughter never
talks, and instead just sits staring off into
nothing, occasionally springing to life in order
to bite her little sister in the arm. Mi-ju's own
sister seems perfectly lively at first, until her
boyfriend dumps her, after which she begins seeing
things and talking on an unplugged phone. And of
course there's that housekeeper, who is just
really, really creep. Compared to these weirdoes,
Mi-ju is a saint. Although an unfathomably
uninteresting and dull one.
As Asian horror movies go,
"Cello" can't help but rely on some of
the familiar tropes of the genre, from that pesky
long-haired female ghost to a plot twist at the
end that's supposed to leave the audience wowed.
That is, if they weren't expecting it. But since
every Asian horror film has a last-minute twist
nowadays, or a twist within a twist, (or even a
twist within a twist within a twist!) it's a given
that "Cello" would have a similar
gimmick. Once you know the twists are coming
sooner or later, they can't help but lose some of
their potency. And predictably, the twist will
doubtless leave audiences mystified and feeling
cheated.
It's easy to give Woo-cheol
Lee props, as the kids say, for wanting to stretch
genre norms to embrace something more than cheap
spills, thrills, and kills. The problem is that in
trying to achieve something unfamiliar within the
genre, Lee purposely ignores those things about
the genre that has people continually take chances
with it in the first place. Is there any gore, at
least? Nope. Blood? Yes. In fact, the blood flows
quite freely in the last 15 minutes or so, but
like the rest of the film, it's all overly
constrained. Most sinful of all is that there are
shockingly few ghost moments in the entire movie,
something that even the more dreadful of Asian
horror films at least manages to fulfill.
There are two notable things
about "Cello": some nice cello music and
humorous moments involving Mi-ju's cute as a
button young daughter. Alas, everything else is
lacking, with the first hour feeling like an
eternity, mainly because nothing happens to
warrant keeping your eyes open at all (with the
exception of a hanging that's pretty neat, if a
tad silly). At the hour mark, the film becomes
unexpectedly sour, starting with the death of a
major character that throttles the film into
territory that is just excruciating to sit
through. |
