2003, South Korea
Original title: 4 Inyong shiktak
It takes a while to figure out what this film has to do with female neurosis, but once it gets there, its imagery is overpowering and creates the melancholic thread that ties the narrative together.
A brief-period buzzfilm on the fest circuit due in part to its repeated images of shocking infant trauma (some of which has been trimmed for DVD release), The Uninvited seems, at first, not much different from many ‘noughties’ Korean genre films: stylistically competent, with an emphasis on overt lighting contrasts, communication clouded by proprietary issues, and a ghost story at its centre.
But the ghosts are just the gatekeepers of the real story.
Interior decorator Jung-won falls asleep in a subway car, and when he jarringly awakens and jumps off the train at the last stop, he notices two little girls asleep on the train with no adult accompaniment.
Instead of alerting the subway officials, or phoning the police, he ignores the incident and goes home.
The next morning he hears on the radio that the two girls were poisoned and left on the train by their mother.
He starts to see them at his house, asleep in the chairs of his new dining room set.
Again he tries ignoring them, staying away from the house as much as possible.
But when he inadvertently meets a narcoleptic woman named Yun and has to take her home when she suddenly faints, she is able to see the children too, and this is where the very female component of the film comes into play.
Yun is severely lethargic and medicated after her best friend Jung-sook threw both of their infant children over a balcony railing a year earlier.
Jung-won is subject to hallucinations and nightmares – most involving a child being run over by a garbage truck and then hidden in a sewer well – and now that he has ghosts hanging around his house, it seems like time to step up and figure out what it all means.
Since Yun can see the ghosts, he figures she may be a conduit for whatever revelation he seeks, and he starts following and pestering her until she finally comes to trust him.
During one of the film’s many languid periods of confession, she reveals that her mother was a shaman, and the two developed a deep bond as a result of their shared visions and the fact that they both felt socially ostracized due to the mother’s supernatural abilities.
“I don’t know why people don’t believe things just by experiencing them”, she laments, referring not just to her mother but also to the doubt that plagued her own failed marriage; her husband is convinced that it was she who tossed their baby overboard, and for most of the film strives to have her committed.
So much of the film is concerned with witnessing and empathy; throughout the film, Jung-won witnesses without connection (he leaves the children in the subway train, drives past Yun fainting in the street and takes no action when he sees a suffering cat lying in the road after being mangled by a car), whereas Yun witnesses with an empathic connection (during her friend’s MRI examination, she feels the claustrophobic terror of being trapped in a tunnel, and in one of the film’s most exceptional scenes, she is standing on her balcony and makes eye contact with a woman who has just jumped from one of the floors above).
This kind of empathy is presented as distinctly female, with the male characters struggling to understand it or to do anything other than dismiss it as nonsense or hysteria.
When replaying the events that led to Jung-sook’s infanticidal crime – through statements made in court as well as through Yun’s memories – Jung-sook’s husband describes how she was afraid of her own child, and would not breast-feed for fear that the child would bite her (even though it had no teeth yet).
It is through a psychic connection with Yun that Jung-sook is able to realize the source of her fear: abandoned as a child, she survived by eating her own mother.
But after being granted this repressed knowledge, Jung-sook is never the same, and slowly becomes unable to function in society, as a mother, or as a friend, killing Yun’s child as well as her own.
Despite this, Yun’s empathy for her friend never diminishes, which obstructs her grieving process and fills her with suicidal guilt.
A confident, remarkable debut feature from female director Lee Soo-youn (and a major award-winner at the Sitges and Fantasia Film Festivals), it’s a true shame she’s never made another, her only follow-up being a commissioned short for Seoul’s International Women’s Film Festival in 2008.
hexafu 