Movie Review: Black House

by refresh_daemon

Horror films are a staple of summer in Korea and the Korean film industry. Typically shot with a more limited budget, they might never take in much money, but the profit margins for successful ones tend to be high, and I can only guess that they show up in Korean summers because the Korean youth on break from school have slightly more time to take in movies.

2007 turned out to be a particularly good year for Korean horror. Hansel and Gretel and Epitaph both provided a nice dosage of atmospheric fantasy horror and several films including Shadows in the Palace, Paradise Murdered, Beautiful Sunday, and Black House all provided interesting takes on the mystery thriller, with both Shadows in the Palace and Black House providing a particularly strong dash of horror to their formula.

Black House is unique among the bunch for a couple reasons. First it’s a Japanese-Korean co-production, made by CJ Entertainment and Kadokawa Pictures, and second, it’s an adaptation of a successful Japanese novel by Yusuke Kishi, which had previously been adapted to the big screen by Yoshimitsu Morita in 1999. However, instead of being a remake of the first film, the Korean version is another interpretation of the novel, echoing what also happened with the Korean remake of the influential Japanese horror hit, The Ring, the Korean version going back to the source for its adaptation.

It’s interesting to note the amount of cultural interchange that happens between Japan and Korea, despite the understandably strained political relationship between the two countries. Well before the United States mined Japan for horror films after the success of the American version of The Ring, Korea was already trading stories with Japan and, in the wake of the increased acceptance of Korean entertainment in Japan, it only makes sense that Japanese film companies would eventually partner with Korean ones to produce films that could play in both markets. Taking a successful Japanese property and giving it a Korean spin being one possible route.

This Korean version of Black House centers around a newly hired insurance investigator, Jeon Juno (Hwang Jung-min), a mild-mannered and idealistic man who harbors guilt for the childhood suicide of his younger brother. One day, he gets a call from a woman who asks if the relatives of those who commit suicide get paid out and, sparking his own memories, immediately assumes she means to kill herself and tries to talk her out of it only to get asked a couple questions and hung up on.

Later, he is personally requested by a company client to visit their home and complete some paperwork, so he heads out to the dark and dilapidated home near the railroad tracks and meets Park Choong-bae (Kang Shin-il), a man who seems just a little distracted. Choong-bae asks Juno to call out his son to greet him and when Juno politely opens Choong-bae’s son’s door, he is shocked to find the boy strung up to the ceiling in an apparent act of suicide.

Soon after the police investigation completes, Juno begins to have doubts on the authenticity of the suicide, seeing that the kid was Choong-bae’s adopted son and, visiting Choong-bae and his mildly disabled wife, Shin E-hwa (Yoo Sun), as they scatter her son’s hastily cremated ashes, his suspicions are affirmed as Choong-bae immediately presents Juno with a request for the hefty insurance they took out on her son’s life. Soon, as Juno investigates into Choong-bae’s unstable background, he finds Choong-bae arriving at the office each day to demand payment and Juno finds himself compelled to prove that Choong-bae killed his son.

What he finds will drag him and those around him into an unexpected horror.

As I’ve never read the novel, I can’t really comment on the success of the adaptation, but the story, especially for most of the movie, is a pretty tightly arranged thriller. There are some parts that are clunky, like how Choong-bae gets Juno to check on his kid before they discover the alleged suicide, but for the most part, it’s written like a procedural thriller with Choong-bae feeling like a ticking time bomb. The film predictably includes a good twist, but it’s given away a little too early, robbing the later revelation’s impact.

And for two thirds of the movie, it’s a pretty tense ride, but the film doesn’t hold together quite as well in the final third and this is for two reasons. One problem is that Juno starts making some unbelievably inane decisions towards the end of the film, including a moment where he takes a fire extinguisher, points it at a knife-wielding killer and sprays it. It doesn’t make sense at all since it creates an obfuscating fog and then he decides to step towards the killer in the fog. It’s baffling moments like those that can hurt a film’s credibility and they happen with increasing frequently towards the end of the film.

The other problem is something that happens in a lot of Korean film, which is the genre shift. Anyone who has seem several Korean films will know that there’s often a shift from comedy to drama or comedy to thriller, for example, the turn from comedy to deadly serious in Covertly, Grandly. When a film does it well, the audience doesn’t even spot it happening, as it’s a natural progression from lightheartedness to seriousness and the film is careful never to create genre rules and expectations that it will later break.

Black House is notable because instead of light to dark, the film actually goes from the already dark thriller in Juno’s investigation of a possible filicide to the even darker territory of a horror film about being hunted by a serial killer. This can be done well and the American thriller Se7en is a film that manages such a transition well. For Black House, the transition is not smooth. It is first set in a very grounded and realistic world. It’s like watching a procedural and, despite having a mentally unstable character like Choong-bae around, it follows the rules of the real world.

In the final third of the film, it turns to horror, which would not be a problem except that the film breaks the unspoken rules about its world that it initially sets up. While now displaying the gruesome ways that some characters might meet their end is not unusual for both a thriller and a horror film, having the villain suddenly display superhuman strength and endurance is something that is strictly the domain of supernatural horror and that happens in Black House. You were watching a movie that was grounded in reality and a display of superhuman strength makes the movie possibly unbelievable. It’s like watching an episode of Dexter and suddenly the villain of the week turns out to be Jason Voorhies from the Friday the 13th movies.

Other horror genre tropes that the film sports also don’t blend well with the realistic thriller that the film started out to be, making it a harder film to swallow by its end.

But aside from that poor change from thriller to horror and moments of stupefying character logic, I think Black House is almost a fine thriller. I might even buy some of the more horrific elements if the film either seeded the horror genre elements earlier or just stuck to a more realistic set of rules after making the transition, because the original story is simply has all the right elements for a good thriller.

Director Shin Tae-ra came a long way from the frequently amateur work in his first film, Brainwave, and generally manages to use a more restrained approach for Black House, suiting the film well. There are some moments that are overdone, like overloading the film with flashbacks to Juno’s brother’s suicide or imaginary background event where his brother commits suicide again, but he works within the style of the film’s two genres well even if the transition between them isn’t quite successful. Shin does insert a few scenes that don’t make any sense at all, including a memorable one where Choong-bae bites his thumb, but when we see him later, that thumb is fine and he’s missing his other thumb. It seems like a random insert without purpose.

The production team for the film really outdid themselves with the titular house truly feeling unnerving even before Juno discovers its secrets and when you see those secrets, it’s everything that you might want from a horror movie set.

Atop the production, what really shines in the film are the performances from the main three players. Hwang Jung-min plays Juno fantastically, perfectly capturing his earnestness and reluctance to conflict well, not even slipping when the script is being forceful, and Kang Shin-il is impressive as well, playing just the right amount of tells to show something is off with Choong-bae while finding a surprising amount of menace. Finally Yoo Sun manages the emotionally distant E-hwa pretty well until a couple points towards the end where she becomes a little inconsistent, but that might be the result of her character being inconsistently written too.

The story is also an excellent pick for adaptation from Japan to Korea because almost no elements of the story seem foreign to Korea after its adaptation. In fact, those watching the film from many countries will find few elements of cultural context that will be unfamiliar. I’m surprised that the novel or the Korean adaptation wasn’t earmarked for an American remake because it, more so than many other Japanese or Korean horror-thriller films that did get an American remake would probably translate easily. And maybe another remake might fix the Korean version’s flaws.

But I think for how well the film moves along and manages to build suspense before it goes off the rails towards the end, Black House is still going to be a fairly enjoyable film for thriller and horror fans, especially considering the well-constructed mystery and how much suspense the film is able to build. Even if the film stumbles in its transition from thriller to horror, enough of the ride was suspenseful enough that I still ended up thinking relatively favorably of Black House, especially compared to many of its horror genre peers.

It seems as though in the last few years, fewer horror films have been released into Korean cinemas in the summer, but it still remains a Korean cinema-going tradition, with this past summer featuring a rare hit horror film in Killer Toon. I can’t say that Black House will entirely satisfy, but if you want to participate in this Korean movie-going tradition one summer and you are a fan of horrific thrillers or thrilling horrors like I Saw the Devil, you might find Black House worth checking out. 6/10.

Note: Black House was released on DVD in multiple regions. Although the Korean DVD appears to be out of print and hard to find, the US Region 1 DVD, despite being out of print, seems readily available used and new at reasonable prices at different online retailers and auction sites. In addition, there appears to be a Chinese/Hong Kong/Taiwanese DVD in circulation as well. Note that there are also DVDs and streaming versions of the Japanese original available, so you might want to check the details before purchasing or starting the movie.