Twitch

So what's it all about? The film opens on Jung Won, a renovator on his way home from a job, who falls asleep on the subway on his way home. He awakens with a jolt at the the last stop, bolts from the train, and turns around just in time to see two little girls, apparently sound asleep, still in the train as it pulls away for its nightly cleaning. He learns the next morning that those two girls were discovered dead by the cleaning crew, evidently poisoned by their own mother. That night Jung Won has a vision of the two corpses sitting at his kitchen table.

"Ah", you're thinking, "Ghosts. It's a horror film." A reasonable assumption, but you're wrong. As the film develops we meet Yun - played as far against her My Sassy Girl stereotype as possible by Jun Ji-Hyun - a troubled narcoleptic woman, driven to the brink of extreme mental illness by her own visions, and who has recently lost a child of her own. From this point on the film becomes a gripping psychological case study of the burden of knowledge - Yun is a Cassandra like figure cursed to know the truth and be disbelieved by most, bringing destruction on those who listen and believe - childhood trauma, infanticide and the tensions between eastern religion and the Christianity that has taken deep roots in Korea.

This is not to say that there aren't horrific moments in the film - there are some devastatingly realistic stunt shots at key moments that I guarantee will leave you gasping for breath - but they are purely secondary to the major thrust of the film. The Uninvited takes a premise that would normally be grist for the standard genre mill and takes it to an entirely different level. Its characters are fully fleshed out, the performances are uniformaly strong and the film beautifully shot and edited. This is one worth seeking out. You can find the Korean edition here and the cheaper Hong Kong edition - this is the one I have and the quality is quite good - here.