Call: Redial at Your Own Risk

I was honestly hoping that this K-horror flick was going to be a Korean remake of The Caller, an American film in which a landline telephone links a contemporary young woman (Park Shin-hye, this time) to another girl (Jun Jong-seo) the same age but in the past. Then, while watching this 2020 Netflix release, I kind of wished it were more of a thriller like The Call, the Halle Berry vehicle about a 911 operator with PTSD issues. But Lee Chung-hyun's Call is definitely indebted more to the former — a supernatural movie about two young women with a disastrous telephonic connection stretching over a decade.

When these two realize that their relationship can alter the future, one major good thing happens followed by one terrible thing after another. Should we be surprised? In what universe does messing with history not lead to disaster? Yet the temptation to make minor adjustments is so great, can any of us really resist? My question became, however, if time isn't linear then is there a way for the person in the future to impact the past of the one in the past? And could the person in the future's present be constantly in flux without impacting their memory like a variation of Groundhog Day? But there are no wedding bells at the end of Call because the butterfly effect sounds a death knoll when it's controlled by a sociopath. Do not pick up. Send directly to messages.

The Larva Island Movie: A Castaway Without a Volley Ball

The two human leads in The Larva Island Movie — Chuck and Grace — are a man who's just returned from a deserted island and a reporter who wants to share his story with her readers. (Caldecott, anyone?) But are they this animated film's most appealing characters? How about his cohabitants on the island, Red and Yellow; this pair of babbling grubs eats hallucinogenic mushrooms, farts, burps, dances, and steals candy while making preposterously silly noises. Plus, the title's about them, not the people, right?

With tongues that serve as peg-legs, eye-visors, climbing-tools, spear-holders, and choreographic enhancers, these two bug buddies aren't your everyday larvae. What did you expect? This is a cartoon to its core. As Chuck puts it, "Turns out bugs are just like really slimy people." Do we believe him? Grace, for her part, is pretty skeptical. And his tale gets even harder to accept when he mentions the singing seal named Clara, the alien who transforms the local crab into a mini-transformer-toolkit, and a tornado with an actual eye at its center. Would anyone buy the hokum of Chuck and Yellow swapping consciousness during a lightning storm? Whether Grace does or not, she's more or less entertained... as are the maitre'd, his daughter, a chef, and one grandmotherly patron. And perhaps you. As for me? I admit, kinda.

Countdown: The Surgical Date Has Been Set

Tae Geon-ho (Jeong Jae-yeong), the hero of Countdown, is a disturbed man — an unsmiling collections agent who desperately needs a liver transplant and is haunted by the death of his son whose particulars he can't remember. Yet despite all those details, he's infinitely less complicated than his primary foil, Cha Ha-yeon (Jeon Do-yeon) — a shameless grifter, just out of the clink, who was the lucky recipient of Tae's son's donated heart which makes her a perfect candidate to donate her liver. Does this qualify as karma? It might although Huh Jung-ho's thriller, let's you decide for yourself.

Because before the surgical date, Cha has her own business to attend to which leads to car chases, kidnapping, heists, extortion, and fisticuffs involving a taser. Given the protagonist's cold manner, you may be excused for not giving a damn whether he gets the life-saving replacement or not but your indifference has no bearing on the tension. If anything, the flaws of the two leads create an openness to whatever the future holds, a long as one of them proves victorious. The real enemies are bumbling gang-members, a sadistic mafia boss (Lee Kyeong-yeong), and a quack physician who thinks that the most reliable cure for a life-threatening disease is to laugh, laugh, laugh.

The Shower: Be Still, My Little Heart

How high are the stakes in Ko Young-nam's The Shower? Not high at all. A country schoolboy (Lee Yeong-su) allows himself to pursue a city girl (Jo Yun-suk) who's relocated to the family farm because her father's hit hard times and has nowhere else to go. There's little action outside that unless you consider scraping your knee on a rock, getting caught in a run-of-the-mill summer storm or a bad case of the flu a cause for major heart-flutters. And yet this exquisitve slice-of-life flick focused on two adolescents is anything but boring. I'd go so far as to say, it's a dazzler — further proof that feeling, not action, is what most enthralls us most of all.

And what views we get amidst the small moments! The visuals of The Shower are so beautiful that you feel entreated to experience your present surroundings anew, especially nature. All hail the trees! All hail the river! There's plenty of rapturous shots of insects, flowers, birds, oxen, the forest, the fields, the minnows, running water, clouds... Every image feels composed thoughtfully but unaffectedly; the entire movie is a gentle reminder that we walk daily through panoramas, not past backdrops. Existence is deep; first love, the real beginning. As for death, it's got its sting.

The Chosen: Forbidden Cave: Lair of the White-haired Worm

The Chosen: Forbidden Cave has an intriguing opening section during which we meet a psychology professor (Kim Seong-gyoon) who specializes in demon possession. The therapeutic treatment of his patients is generally successful, somewhat secretive — so much so that a cocky reporter (Cha Ye-Ryeon) has to bribe his psychic assistant (Kim Hye-Seong) in order to gain access to the determined devil doctor. Once that's transpired, we zero in on a single case (at which point the movie gets less scary). The primary patient is a widowed museum director (Yu Seon) — with an elementary school-aged daughter (Yoon Ji-Min) — who's been experiencing blackouts that apparently find her taking actions disturbing enough to cause her child to ask her whether this is the good mommy or the bad mommy. So what are the roots of this possession? Oh, it's complicated. Too much so.

Rape. Snakes. Death sentences. Shamanism. Stigmata. Exorcism. A cursed painting. Militarism. Kidnapping. Cave-dwelling. Even Jeju Island's hard-to-comprehend regional dialect comes into play. In short, Kim Hwi's fulsome fright flick crams as many ideas as possible into its plot. But do these endless elements add to the chills or detract from them? For me, the scariest part of The Chosen came early when a hypnotized client started speaking in a baby voice to the sound of a metronome. I would've been happy enough experiencing a series of such therapeutic encounters instead of the deep dive the movie's director chose to take with one particularly accursed art curator. No one asked for my prescription though.