Marui Video (2023)

Original title: 마루이 비디오

Large parts of Marui Video supposedly consist of footage shot by a small documentary crew, seized by the police and only later made public, as is tradition. The fictional filmmakers stumble upon rumours about a curious “Marui Video” from a couple of decades ago. “Marui Video” is apparently the term used by Busan’s prosecutor’s office for film footage too gruesome to be made public. It shows a man brutally murdering his girlfriend in an inn under very curious circumstances that any regular horror movie viewer will easily identify as signs of possession. There’s also the face of a man visible in a mirror for a couple of seconds who can’t possibly be there. The video itself is supposed to be cursed, as well. At least, it is impossible to copy it by any other way but filming off the screen when it is playing, and the archive where it is harboured has a case of rather curious mould growing on its ceiling, which strikes everyone involved as rather unnatural and creepy.

The video and the murder case lead our intrepid investigators (predominantly a producer/director played by Seo Hyun-woo and a reporter played by Jo Min-kyung) on the trail of another, related murder which also has several aspects that never seem to fit quite right into a rational world. The further down they crawl the rabbit hole of the cases, the more their own lives are infected with strangeness: things in their office move around by themselves, electronic devices develop a mind of their own, and eventually, one of them will begin to suffer from a mental break-down of the possession kind. Fortunately, characters in a South Korean movie are not afraid to visit a shaman when the supernatural comes calling; unfortunately, shamanistic intervention doesn’t necessarily always work.

Most of the POV horror movies I’ve seen in the last half a year or so have been of the cheerful and ultra-cheap variant of the genre, where fuzziness is a given, pixelling out faces is a sign of authenticity, and wavering hand camera work the name of the game. So a sub-genre entry like Yoon Joon-hyeong’s Marui Video comes as a bit of a culture shock, for it was clearly made with a budget, something that comes hand in hand with actual, professional acting, a coherent script, and a visual language that uses all kinds of authentic looking yet high resolution found footage devices as well as a lot of material that looks as if it were shot by the professional filmmakers the characters are supposed to be. There’s still some wild camerawork, but this is reserved for some particularly intense scenes where this makes logical and – more importantly – dramatic sense.

Though I love some crazy low budget/low res POV shenanigans, and find the low budget realm the natural habitat of POV horror, when used as efficiently and intelligently as here (or in something like The Medium, which I have inexplicably never written about here), a certain slickness can work very well with the sub-genre, still keeping the feeling of authenticity that is part and parcel of POV (unless you’re one of those people who always need to ask why the characters keep filming), and turning it into something closer to a traditional narrative.

Interestingly enough, the type of narrative Marui Video is for large parts of its running time is an investigative one. The film spends much time on the filmmakers trying to solve its mystery as if it were a normal crime, so there’s a pleasant amount of scenes of the characters looking for clues, interviewing witnesses, and attempting to puzzle out the nature of the incidents that created the curse they seem to have stumbled upon. Obviously, this is always interrupted by the escalating supernatural threat surrounding them, which makes both the supernatural and the mundane halves of the film more effective: the former, it grounds in the feeling of reality POV horror is so often great at providing, while it adds a degree of unpredictability to the latter.

Adding to Marui Video’s strengths is how good  it is at showing both of its aspects. The horror sequences are genuinely creepy (and escalate wonderfully from the minor to the inevitable doom), and the central mystery well-constructed. There’s very little about the film I didn’t enjoy.