In short: Hide-and-Never-Seek (2015)

aka One-Man Tag

Original title: 혼숨

Ya-gwang aka Glow (Ryu Deok-hwan) is the moderator of an internet show concerning itself with the debunking of supposed paranormal phenomena. Glow combines the obnoxiousness of a Twitch streamer with the blinkered arrogance of the professional debunker (says a guy who doesn’t believe in any of that paranormal stuff but sees no reason to be an asshole about it), and ass-clownish tendencies all of his own. He and his producer Park (Jo Bok-rae) really want their show to be “epic” and “legendary”, as they never stop telling anybody who does or does not want to hear it.

And wouldn’t you know it, a video of a schoolgirl playing but not properly finishing a game of good old Japanese Hitori Kakurenbo (or one-man hide and seek/tag) on a library toilet leads them onto the path of becoming legends…urban legends that is.

Formally, Lee Doo-hwan’s feature film debut as a director is yet another entry into the good old POV horror genre, though one that assumes its producers of commercial video to be actually able to shoot stuff competently, making the whole affair look not quite as nausea and/or squint inducing as is sub-genre tradition. It still isn’t an original film, of course: movies about ghost hunting etc show hosts encountering the actual supernatural are a dime a dozen, and even Hitori Kakurenbo has featured in a couple of films already.

However, as I always say, originality isn’t everything. There is often something to be said for a film reproducing the same old but doing it well, with conviction, verve, style, or just tiny twists on the formula. Hide-and-Never-Seek indeed manages to be a rather entertaining movie, at least. In part, it works because it manages to re-create the feel of watching (or witnessing with disgust) a Twitch or YouTube-style streamer with ambitions of grandeur rather well. Ryu provides Glow with just the right kind of obnoxiousness to make watching his antics interesting even for the stretches of the movie when little of dramatic impact is happening, and inducing at least in this viewer pleasant fantasies of seeing the guy getting mauled by ghosts. Surprisingly, he also sells a late movie face turn so that it works surprisingly well.


I also found myself rather fond of the film’s directness. This is not a story of complicated twists and turns or the too calculated shock effects of (too) much of contemporary US mainstream horror, but the sort of spooky tale you could actually imagine being told around a computer screen – the modern campfire, always in need of new tales.