I’ll admit it, I have immersed myself in the Asia Extreme films being run on the Sundance channel. Ever since seeing Oldboy last year, I’ve become enamored with hard-boiled Korean flicks. Then I saw Phone late last year, and Korean horror become the new standard against which all horror films would have to be compared. Since then, I’ve also enjoyed Japanese films that fall into this extreme and new take on horror. This post will cover three films I recently watched, though more are sure to come. [I just purchased the final film in Park Chan-wook's vengeance trilogy. Stay tuned for some thoughts on that in the future!]
Two of the films in this entry’s title are Korean: Acacia and Wishing Stairs, while Dark Water is from Japan. Wishing Stairs is the most recent one we watched, so let me start there. Directed by Yun Jae-yeon, the story covers a girls art boarding school, filled with teenage girls studying dance and sculpture. The title of the film refers to a set of stairs that lead up to the dormitory. There are 28 steps, but legend has it that if you start at the bottom and count each stair, if you reach a mystical 29th step, you can ask the “Wolf” to grant you a wish, no matter how selfish or macabre it may be. Well, in order to keep things exciting, several of the students reach this 29th step and the horror that unfolds is exciting. The story focuses on three of the girls, two dancers and one overweight/svelte sculptor. One dancer, So-hee, is the belle of the ball, as it were, popular, pretty and talented beyond belief. The other, Jin-sung works hard but always comes in second to her friend. The 29th step opens up the possibility of Jin-sung to surpass So-hee, but there’s a cost, and it’s deadly. Of the three films in this post, this is the weakest. But, there’s some good scares that happen, so it’s worth a watch.
Acacia, directed by Park Ki-Hyung, is a twisted take on the adopted child that turns out to be a little less angelic and a tad bit satanic. A Korean couple adopts six year old Jin-seong, a quiet boy attracted to the leafless acacia tree in the back yard. The boy gradually comes out of his shell, just in time for his parents to become pregnant with a son of their own. Jin-seong senses the stress of not being a biological child in this familial unit and disappears. While we wait to see if the police will find the boy, strange things begin happening, including the slow degradation of the bond between the husband and wife and more curiously, the acacia tree has come into full bloom. What lurks behind these developments is resolved in the final section of the film. In a truly innovative flashback/flash-forward technique, the story’s dark spaces become illuminated. And it’s not an easy light to look into.
Finally, let me turn to my favorite film of these three, Dark Water. Japanese director Hideo Nakata, of The Ring fame, tells a dark story of a separated mother and her six year old daughter moving into an apartment complex. Shot in a haunting, grayish, washed-out color, mother and daughter learn of the residents who lived above them, a single father and his daughter who disappeared and is presumed dead. The vacant apartment doesn’t seem to be totally vacant, and a theme of water permeates the film, from outside rain, to baths, to the sink, to an ominous water stain in the ceiling that just won’t go away. The films is eerie on a visceral level and at each turning point in the film, you feel as though your head might go under the water and you might not be able to get back to the surface. Stylistically, this film was the best of the three, and its storytelling was the most enchanting and frightening.
