Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Yoon Eun-kyoung
Starring: Lee Se-young, Park ji-young, Park So-yi, Seo Yeung-jo, Jeon Su-ji
What's lingering most in writer/director Yoon Eun-kyoung's
feature debut is the tangible aftertaste of the wave of Asian horrors that
found global success in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Yes, it's an another
tale of a protagonist being spooked by the lank-haired ghost of a young
girl. Your tolerance for Lingering will depend on how burnt
out you've become on such tropes, as like so many recent Korean horrors,
Eun-kyoung's film plays closer to the mediocre American remakes of classic
K-horrors than the originals themselves.
Here it's a hotel that's being menaced by a straggly-haired spirit. After
having her adorable little sister, Jiyoo (Park So-yi), rejected for a
place at yet another orphanage, twentysomething Yoo-mi (Lee Se-young)
decides to take up a longstanding offer of giving the child over
to Kyeong-seon (Park Ji-young), her late mother's best friend
and the owner of a hotel in her countryside hometown.
As soon as Yoo-mi arrives, things begin taking a sinister turn. The hotel's
one off-season maid, Ye-rin (Park Hyo-joo), is constantly drunk
and makes passive aggressive gestures to Yoo-mi. Figures appear in mirrors
and the inky blackness of TV screens, only to disappear when Yoo-mi turns to
confront their three-dimensional forms. Balls roll inexplicably down
corridors. Room 405, where something terrible once occurred, appears to be
ground zero for the hotel's brand of evil.
Like much recent K-horror, Lingering takes on the form of a
procedural thriller as our protagonist conducts an investigation into her
late mother's relationship with the hotel. This is where fans of more
traditional horror fare may lose patience, as the movie begins to resemble
an episode of a TV detective show, occasionally remembering to throw in the
odd uninspired supernatural set-piece to keep us onboard. It's a struggle to
stay invested in the plot as it's so run of the mill, and as Yoo-mi,
Se-young is a stiff presence who seems incapable of displaying the sort of
emotions you imagine someone in her place might experience.
Visually, cinematographer Lee Hyeong-bin provides
Lingering with a darkly attractive facade, but his director
doesn't seem an easy fit with the horror genre and fails to enliven his
film's rote set-pieces. Much of the heavy lifting is left to the sound
design, which will have you worrying that rats have gotten into your walls
if you watch Lingering through a decent home cinema
system.
Lingering belongs to the sub-genre of horror movies that take
place in off-season resorts. It's a sub-genre that has given us the likes of
Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, Paul Bartel's Private Parts and this year's
Make Up. It's generally a formula for success, as there's something inherently
unsettling about the emptiness of usually bustling lobbies and corridors.
It's a shame that Eun-kyoung can't exploit his premise as he opens his movie
with a couple of effective sequences - a pre-credits set-piece in which a
young girl is stalked through long grass and a cracking jump scare involving
a rear view mirror - but ultimately he gets bogged down in a plot that fails
to sufficiently grab our attention, and many viewers will likely check out
early.
