The Mimic: Do Not Adopt This Child

What would you do if you chanced upon a lost, bedraggled little girl in the woods outside your new house? How about if it were right after a pair of neighbor kids had a terrifyingly supernatural experience nearby? Would you invite her into your home and unquestioningly welcome her into your open arms as she assumes the name and vocal cadences of your young daughter then drives your senile mother insane? Or would you get her over to the local Children's Services? For reasons that eventually work against her, mom Hee-yeon (Yum Jung-ah) takes the first approach in Huh Jung's creepy ghost story The Mimic. But like us, husband Min-ho (Park Hyuk-kwon) badly wishes she'd take the second option. He knows what it's like to lose a child since the couple lost their own son five years ago at a mall. Wouldn't the smart thing to do be to get this lost young girl (Shin Rin-ah) to the cops so they can track down men missing parents? Or considering the bruises all over her back, one might also get her into some proper foster care? When grandma (Heo Jin) pulls a knife on their unofficial adoptee, is anyone doing anyone else a favor by providing this young orphan a home?

Obviously, I was not consulted. And while I do have some advice for this movie's central couple, I don't know how much of it would have been useful when the tiger spirit emerged in the little girl's birth father, a shaman who'd clearly gone off the deep end, too. If this all sounds amusing, it's actually not. The Mimic is kind of scary. Not keep you up so you can't sleep at night scary. More like, you think you're not that scared but then you end up having a nightmare anyway. That kind of scary. Proceed at your own risk.

Hide and Seek: The Proper Way to Address a Murderer

One of the unforeseen but enjoyable side-effects of studying the Korean language is being able to spot when characters in Korean movies are speaking to each other with respect. And when they're not! In the serial killer thriller Hide and Seek, for example, there's a scene in which the murderer is terrorizing two children (Jeong Joon-won, Kim Soo-an) trapped in a car. Given the killer's age, expensive coat, and real estate holdings, I would've expected these two kids to speak to their attacker with greater deference. I guess the rule of thumb however is to automatically default to a more casual form of address when screaming at a murderer. I would've missed this nuance in the movie if I hadn't started taking Korean!

It could also be that writer-director Jung Huh is making an intergenerational statement in Hide and Seek. Maybe these two kids don't respect any adults because their parents are so inadequate. Their mom (Jeon Mi-seon) is a negligent whiner who lets them play in a ghetto alleyway while she yammers away with her stateside mother on the phone. Their dad (Son Hyeon-ju) is a withdrawn enigma who exhibits creepy obsessive compulsive behavior and breaks out into unprovoked violence in the middle of the night. Why speak to adults with respect when they're so messed up? Come to think of it, that's a question every generation must ask.

I'm guessing that Pyaong-hwa (Kim Ji-yeong), the pirate-patched daughter of the poor, harried mom that lives next door to the long-lost, potentially-deranged brother (Kim Won-hae) of the OCD dad, already has her own answer. From the looks of it, this little girl has taken it upon herself to is learn English -- and is taking to it quickly -- because the language doesn't require such differentiations in respectful address. She's not about to "sir" or "ma'am" anyone. Everything is casual in the US. Even, some may argue, murder.