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Review

Korean high school girls, in tight tailored uniforms, swear like sailors, manipulate authority figures and bully each other. Amidst the catty chaos, two fall in love. Just another normal day at the private school where the Whispering Corridors trilogy takes place. Then, some ghostly haunting ensues and it becomes clear that this is no normal peer group.

Hyo-Shin, she of the longer haired-black widow-lipstick Lesbian school, seduces the quiet, athletic (read: more butch) Shi-eun. They begin to keep a clever, neatly illustrated diary together. They also begin to share a telepathic bond. The girls around them are self-conscious; forever worrying about weight and height and bust size. They all clique off into little groups and leave the two lovers behind.

Hyo-Shin jumps off the school roof. Is it suicide or was she pushed? In the following days, the girls become more divided on how they felt about their classmate and how they should deal with her survivor. Concurrently, another student, Min-Ah, finds the diary and begins to read it. She begins to understand the relationship between the two girls. The power of the diary allows her to strike up a telepathic bond with the mysterious Shi-eun.

Of course, Hyo-Shin, not wanting to have died in vain, comes back as a ghost and begins to terrorize the school in a sort of more supernatural but very Carrie-style. The haunting is not gratuitous. Hyo-Shin wants her death to be understood. She wants to be remembered correctly (Memento Mori: remember the dead).

The filming is great. Colors are brilliantly saturated, recalling Lynch’s Blue Velvet. The mammoth, characterless institutional architecture is shot in such away that frames the micro-relationships within the larger group. The music is all horror: piano, synthesizer and girls choir. What more do you need? Oh, acting. That might be the most impressive bit on a second or third watch. There are many no-budget special effects as there often are in ghost movies. There has to be really good acting to pull these off. The girls do it.

 -- Mark Sconyers