Sunday, March 1, 2009

In short: Someone Behind You (2007)

Ga-jin (Jin-Seo Yoon)'s family is a little troubled. For years they have been plagued by an absurdly high rate of violent deaths (although the children of the family were somehow kept out of the loop about this).

On the wedding day of Ga-jin's aunt, her fiancé throws her down a balcony. Auntie, being quite hard-headed, as it seems, survives, but a few hours later, her own sister stabs her to death in front of Ga-jin. The high school girl-played-by-a-woman-in-her-20s is rather traumatized by it and so it's not too surprising when she's plagued by nightmares in which a badly burned dead woman tells her that she's next.

Unfortunately, that's the truth. Suddenly just about everyone who holds even the smallest grudge against our heroine feels the need to literally bash her head in; there might even be a time coming when a girl can't trust her own mother anymore.

Well, the first hour or so of Someone Behind You is rather neat. As long as the film is playing with Ga-Jin's growing sense of paranoia about the people around her (especially those people she trusts the most), it achieves some effective moments of unease. But for some reason, the film (or its director Ki-hwan Oh) isn't satisfied with having one good idea and just running with it, instead it adds a vengeance seeking psychopath whose motivations really could be made a lot clearer to the supernatural curse plot-line, and ends in a surprise double-twist ending that is at once no surprise at all and just plain confusing.

I am usually the last to complain about a lack of exposition, but exposition (or at least some explanations) is exactly what the film's ending needs. As it is, Someone Behind You mostly seems confused about what kind of horror story it actually wants to tell.

It's quite a shame about the solid acting and the excellent beginning, really.

 

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