CCTV: Someone's Always Watching

Now that we carry our phones wherever we go and sit at desks topped by computers with built-in cameras, our activities and whereabouts are pretty much monitored from dawn to dusk. Is paranoia inevitable? Or has this technologically invasive element turned us into performers 24/7? Either way, the news crew in CCTV is having a particularly rough go of it this particular day because their on-the-job recordings are being invaded by a murderous spirit, recalling the station's sordid past. Which seems to have little influence in inhibiting them from committing various distasteful acts within the workplace, supernatural be damned.

Indebted to The Ring (possessed videos), The Blair Wood Project (found footage), Poltergeist (soul-swallowing televisions), The Exorcist (demon possession), The Sentinel (whited-out eyes), and Terror Train (New Year's Eve setting), writer-director Kim Hong-ik's low-budget horror flick can come across like a skeleton assembled from random bones. The action — appropriately perhaps — takes place in some in between time where staffers work on cell phones and paper notepads with nary a laptop or USB drive in sight. And despite the murders piling up in the newsroom, everyone's hesitant to call the police. No one trusts authority. Not in this building! How can they when there are so many backstabbers around that you're hardly surprised when one character (Kwak Do-won) gets stabbed in the eye. The takeaway: Trust no one. Even if they've got the evidence on a VHS tape. (Which is another way of saying, I didn't buy this movie's late-in-the-game whodunit explanation.)

Seire: Murphy's Law for Babies

In Seire, superstitions aren't necessarily true but believing in them certainly shapes behavior. The big taboo in Park Kang's horror flick is doing anything unusual or untoward in the first few weeks following your baby's birth. Apparently, going to a funeral or — heaven forbid! — a burial can have disastrous consequences: Every apple you slice in half will be rotten to the core; your infant is going to get a sudden fever; you're going to start committing petty crimes — even stooping so low as to rob a homeless man in the streets. And then there are the nightmares.

Seire isn't exactly frightening but it does disturb. Because you sense that our antihero (Seo Hyun-woo), the young father who disregards the old school houserules of his wife (Shim Eun-woo), treated his last girlfriend (who he got pregnant) pretty abominably. I wouldn't go so far as to say that the suffering his infant child undergoes is karmic justice but you don't feel bad that the man's life is going to seed. Seire doesn't make the supernatural feel real, even if the presence of twins does conjure up our sense of natural wonder — especially when they look so alike they have to be played by the same actress, Ryu Sun-young. Instead, it makes a suspected power palpable... which can make for a good movie, too. Can you build your plot around suppositions, hallucinations, and bad dreams? Based on Seire, I'd say, "If you like."

My Name Is Loh Kiwan: Tough Life

You think you have it rough? Consider the life of Loh Kiwan, a North Korean refugee (Song Joong-ki) who flees with his mother to China, only to flee again on his own to Brussels where he's got no friends, no family, and very little money (which he loses soon enough). To stay he's going to have to prove his nationality but how do you do that exactly when your country of origin doesn't share birth records and your first second home has its own bureucractic complications compounded by the fact that you were — by necessity — living a secret life. There's more. You can't get a legal job. You don't know the language so you can't argue on your own behalf. The first non-governmental person you make that also speaks Korean is a pretty drug addict (Choi Sung-eun) with a criminal history and a massive debt tied to it. Still think you've got it rough?

I've lived in a bare-bones SRO with not much money to my name; I've survived off a diet of hotdogs, cornflakes and alcohol but I've never been this alone, this dependent on the kindness of strangers, this out of my element. Thankfully, there are some kind strangers out there: a Chinese-Korean meatpacker (Lee Sang-hee) and the father (Jo Han-chul) of the woman who stole his wallet then his heart... Sure, they're flawed and make his life worse at times but when there's so much bad in this life that taking the bad with the good isn't so bad because at least it comes with some good. My Name Is Loh Kiwan made me appreciate my life. It also made me appreciate some people's ability to salvage a stylish wardrobe from the discard bin.

Moon: True Blue, Not True

As of March 2024, South Korea has yet to send a spaceship to the moon but given that other countires have — the U.S., China, Russia, Israel, and India — I don't know if I'd classify Moon as science fiction so much as a speculative drama. In short... What if Korea sent three men in a rocket intended for a lunar landing but then it exploded? Then what if history repeated itself again, except the second time one (Do Kyung-soo) of the astronauts was the son of one of the old ones? As an added twist, you could always have the primary advisor (Sol Kyung-gu) be associated with the earlier disaster, too.

Director-writer Kim Yong-hwa doesn't stop there either. For drama, he adds meteor storms, a moonquake, an unhelpful, unsympathetic clique at NASA, and an arty bloody nose in which red globules float around the space capsule, gravity-free. The dialogue is largely descriptive: the astronauts describe what's happening as we see it; the space team on earth describes what they're seeing; the news reporters describe what's just happened. A Korean-American administrator may emerge as the closest thing this movie has to a hero; the white guys are definitely the enemies. It's hard to like people who have to be told, "Forget his nationality for now!"