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.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment