Original title: 귀문 gwi-mun
In 1990, a janitor at a country community centre goes on a killing spree with a shovel, murdering quite a few visitors and colleagues. Afterwards, the building is haunted by strange acts of violence, and is quickly condemned, Yet even then, it seems to draw people to their doom, keeping their spirits trapped between the worlds of the living and the dead. Particularly the last night of the Lunar Year is a dangerous time, for then, the moon of the afterlife rises above the building, opening the titular lightless door that seems to transcend space and time.
More than half a decade after the killings, an experienced shaman attempts to cleanse the building and free the trapped spirits, but is overwhelmed and killed herself instead. Some years later, in 2002, her son Do-jin (Kim Kang-woo), armed with years of research, the basic abilities that come with his lineage, and a spirit-exorcising dagger, enters the building on the last night of the Lunar Year to finish what his mother started.
He encounters, ghosts, ghoulies, as well as spatial and temporal shifts that let him cross ways with a group of film students exploring the place in 1995. He’ll also learn what actually causes the rather spectacular hauntings.
I had a lot of fun with Shim Duck-geun’s Guimoon. At its core, it’s yet another film that nearly exclusively consists of groups of people trampling through creepy modern ruins encountering supernatural stuff, and proceeds to present a series of not terribly original creep-outs set pieces in the manner of your basic haunted house ride. However, while there’s a certain lack of originality in the scares, and very little characterisation and character development on display beyond character set-ups necessary for the plot, the film isn’t lacking in variety. Shim seems to be very adept at all basic horror techniques, pacing moments of suspense and jump scares with quite a bit more mood building than movies about people walking through haunted ruins usually get up to.
The film also does quite a bit of effective work with the timey-whimey stuff. It uses the temporal shifts and crossings of times and space not just to fill in backstory in a visually more exciting manner than having Do-jin go through files would provide, but clearly also aims to engender a feeling of confusion in its viewers, very effectively turning your basic industrial ruin into a stranger and more interesting place than it would otherwise be.
All of which suggests filmmakers that have watched about as many of these kinds of horror movies as I have, have managed to identify their major problems, and decided not to copy others’ mistakes. Consequently, Guimoon turns into a fun, spooky time.
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