Director: Pil-sung Yim
Writers: Ji-hye Kim, Min-sook Kim
Stars: Jeong-myeong Cheon, Eun Won-jae, Eun-kyung Shim
Run Time: 1 Hour, 57 Minutes
Amazon Link: https://amzn.to/39BQjQw
Synopsis
We see a man running down a road, and he says something vaguely creepy for a few seconds until the credits roll.
A young guy is driving down the road, and his young wife calls to nag about her pregnancy. He wrecks the car, distracted by the call. He wakes up to find himself wandering alone in the woods, apparently very lost, until he passes out. He wakes up after dark to find a young woman standing over him with a lantern. She says her name is Young-hee Kim, and he is Eun-Soo. She claims to be out looking for her sister’s hairpin, in the forest, at night. Finally they come to a very nice house, named “The House of Happy Children.”
Inside the house, it’s like Christmas everyday, very lively and colorful. Eun-soo is introduced to the whole family. They don’t have a telephone. They seem impossibly nice; you just know from the first scene that something isn’t quite right here.
“Day One” flashes up on the screen the next morning when he wakes up. The whole family has cupcakes and candy for breakfast, and it’s all for him; they don’t eat. After breakfast, he sets off through the woods back to the road, but it soon gets dark, and he gets lost again, even though it should still be morning. He finds himself in front of the same house. He asks the couple to help him through the woods in the morning, and they make uncomfortable excuses. The children are happy, and the parents are uncomfortable. I’m already getting a certain “Twilight Zone episode” vibe about this time.
Eun-soo tells the children to think of him as their brother. The next morning, the children are crying as the parents have gone off and left them in his care. The eldest girl says he should have marked his way with breadcrumbs to find his way back out of the forest.
Soon, Eun-soo starts seeing ghosts in the attic. One the third day, the children give him a map through the woods, but he runs into another couple coming to the house through a snowstorm. The children are luring in another new couple. The snow gets deeper and deeper, and Eun-soo has to finally return to the house.
The new couple don’t really go in for spoiled children, and the children turn against them quickly. Eun-soo then finds the original mother hiding in the attic, and she explains it all to him. Then things start getting worse for Eun-soo…
Commentary
The first thing you notice about this is how colorful and bright it is, and it stays that way for the most part. It’s a slow burn of a movie, with the weirdness getting deeper and deeper without moving very quickly. Everything gets explained by the end, and it all makes sense, but it does drag a bit.
The acting is good all around. The parents are suitably terrified. The strangers are suitably creepy, Eun-soo is suitably bewildered, and the children alternate between innocent and demonic.
Then again, we were about halfway through the film when Kevin asked if I had ever seen that Twilight Zone episode I mentioned two paragraphs into the review, so the lack of originality wasn’t just clear to me. This is definitely not an original idea, but then again, what would you expect from Hansel and Gretel?