Directed by: Kim Kwang-bin (김광빈)
Starring: Ha Jung-woo (하정우), Kim Nam-gil (김남길), Huh-yul (허율)
Review: While Korea has had its share of successful horror films over the years, with A Tale of Two Sisters (2003), The Wailing (2016), Train to Busan (2016) (only if we’re counting the zombie genre as horror, which I would argue has become its own genre now) and the recent Gonjiam (2018) coming to mind, few have actually been able to really leave their marks as true classics of the genre considering the amount of average to slightly above average offerings we’ve seen over the years.
Korea’s latest supernatural horror film, The Closet (2020), makes a valiant effort to join the ranks of genre giants with a superb production design brought to life with a committed performance from the reliable Ha Jung-woo (Beastie Boys, 2008; The Handmaiden, 2016), but falls short with its uneven choices in tone and character development.
Sang-won (Ha Jung-woo) is an award-winning architect trying to put his life back together after losing his wife in a tragic car accident. He and his daughter Ina (Huh-yul) survived the crash but are still coping with the intense mental and emotional distress of their loss which has in turn strained their relationship. So on doctor’s orders, they decide to move to a big house in the country where the clean air and quiet surroundings are to help in their recovery. What they don’t know, is that the closet inside Ina’s bedroom holds a mysterious portal to a dark realm that threatens to pull their family apart even further.
Timing couldn’t be worse for Sang-won to have his new design project green lit and to be summoned to the construction site in the city as his daughter Ina begins to show strange personality altering symptoms. And no sooner after the hiring of an offbeat “in-it-for-the-money” nanny to watch over Ina during the week and Sang-won scheduled to visit on weekends kicks off, Ina mysteriously disappears without a trace. With months gone by without any leads, Sang-won accepts an offer to help from the self-proclaimed spirit medium Gyung-hoon (Kim Nam-gil) who believes Ina’s disappearance may be linked to a ten year long supernatural mystery.
The Closet sets a great tone of foreboding as it kicks off with a creepy found footage style recording of a traditional shamanistic exorcism followed by the introduction of the classic haunted house setting that the family moves in to. With crows flying overhead and daughter Ina turning the creepy child dials all the way up, think third-act Danny Torrance from The Shining (1980), all on top of your standard jump scares, the groundwork for a great atmospheric horror get put in place. And by the time Ina goes missing, the film’s music combined with Ha Jung-woo’s desperation had the audience slowly leaning more and more forward in our seats as we prepared ourselves for a missing-child story that was going to require a father’s literal trip to hell and back to recover his daughter.
The result turned out to be more of a Ghost Hunters meets Hellraiser meets The Children of the Corn mashup, which would actually be pretty awesome if it weren’t for the odd tonal choices taken with the arrival of Kim Nam-gil’s (Memoir of a Murderer, 2016) character, the wacky ghost-hunting spirit medium, Gyung-hoon. I get that they wanted him to come off as a bit of a quack to make it so that Sang-won needed some convincing as well as to provide some comic relief to all the tension and jump scares, but it was just too much for me. His Interstellar (2014) wormhole reference for explaining how to move between dimensions, on top of asking if Sang-won had seen Along With the Gods: The Two Worlds (2017), which actor Ha Jung-woo starred in, is sure to crack a few smiles, but it comes as such a sudden shift in tone that it is sure to jolt some viewers out of the experience.
This may come down to a personal preference, or call me picky, but I want my spirit mediums to be serious like Hwang Jung-min’s character in The Wailing (2016). And what made the dark exorcism film The Priests (2015) work so well was its steady and serious tone throughout. The Closet edges more towards the campy side of the horror spectrum with the choices it makes with the Gyung-hoon character in particular. This also wouldn’t have been as much as an issue if Ha Jung-woo’s character Sang-won had slid more fluidly along this spectrum, but he stays very much on the serious and dramatic side which ultimately made for a very unbalanced mid to late section of the film. The Closet also feels somewhat empty after Ina disappears. Huh-yeol did such a good job establishing this character that if she were to appear more during the middle section of the movie, she could have balanced out the two leads better.
The Closet has more it wants to say about mental health and how we treat children, but the message doesn’t pack the punch it hopes to in its climax that sandwiches some tear-jerking moments in between its final scares. And while it was interesting to see Kim Nam-gil in a more comical role than we are accustomed to seeing him in, the clash between his and Ha Jung-woo’s character could not find the balance it needed to get the audience fully behind their daring final attempt to solve the mystery. So those willing to look past the tonal issues and if expectations aren’t too high, there is a decent level of enjoyment to be found in The Closet. SCORE 6.5/10
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