A Touch of Unseen (2014)

Original title: 귀접

Yes, well, I don’t know about that English title either, but then, the subtitles are of a comparable quality.

Yeon-hee (Park Soo-in) has been having a really bad time lately. Her ex-boyfriend turned stalker Hak-cheol (Kim Jae-seung) has returned to their university, even though she only didn’t leave him to the tender mercies of the South Korean justice system because he went to the military instead. Hak-cheol is clearly going to continue where he left off, making creepy eyes at her 24/7, popping up in front of her home, and being an all-around threatening creep. That’s not the only trouble in the poor girl’s life, though. There’s also the incubus (Choi Ri-ho) that comes to visit her nightly, a thing that holds as little to the concept of consens as her stalker.

When Yeon-hee stops coming to school, her friend Seon-mi (Yoon Chae-young) goes to her flat where she finds the girl unconscious on the floor. At a bit of a loss what to do, Seon-mi calls Yeon-hee’s estranged older sister Yeon-soo (Lee Eon-jeong) for help.

Yeon-soo one day just packed her things and left her younger sister to fend for herself without any apparent reason, but she follows Seon-mi’s call at once. Turns out Yeon-soo had been visited by the same incubus herself, and left Yeon-hee behind in the hopes to protect her from the thing’s dubious attentions. Obviously, that hasn’t turned out terribly well. But now, reunited, the sisters might just have a chance against evil spirits and creepy stalkers alike.

Lee Hyeon-cheol’s incubus horror is certainly an interesting film. It’s also a film that’s by far not sure enough of what it wants to achieve and how to get there to handle the themes it takes on. It’s clear that its incubus parts want to be about more than some sleazy ghost sexy times but then goes and is pretty sleazy about Park Soo-in’s body and clearly can’t help itself and makes the ghost rape scenes not sound and look like rapes. It’s an approach that left this viewer rather uncomfortable, not because the film actually attempted to make me feel that way, but because it didn’t seem to put any effort into doing that at all. It’s also a confusing approach to the material Lee is handling here, for the narrative’s sympathies are strictly presented as on the side of the sisters; it just seems a bit too interested in titillation than it does in actually following through here (in part perhaps because of South Korean censorship mores?).

It is, on the other hand, completely clear that the film is utterly against Hak-cheol’s creepy stalker-dom, and it certainly – if quietly – suggests that the dice are very much weighed against women in these situations. It just doesn’t do anything terribly interesting with that whole situation either. The script is rather rough around the edges, with only a handful of scenes that actually connect the stalker and the ghost rapist parts dramatically, and little attempts at using the obvious thematic connections for anything much. It’s probably best to imagine the scripts of a stalker thriller and of The Entity had some sort of freak accident, perhaps involving radioactive spiders.


Lee’s direction isn’t too hot, either – there’s little sense of flow to anything, drama and excitement aren’t terribly high, and even the promise of an invisible ghost baby later on leads absolutely nowhere. The film just sort of starts and later finishes, its plot more or less resolved but told in such a bland manner it is difficult to feel much of anything about it.