Screening accompanied by an introduction.
When Myung-hye (Seo Yeong-hee) moves into a remote, suspiciously cheap rental home with husband Hyun-min (Kim Min-jae) and children, her nightmares intensify and she repeatedly hears a strange noise coming from the locked shed. This is also heard by her adopted daughter Hee-woo (Kim Bomin), who has a special sensitivity to the other side.
Adapted from Jeon Gun-woo’s novel The Contorted House, but also drawing liberally (if dynamically) on both Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) and Kim Jee-woon’s A Tale Of Two Sisters (2003), this horror feature from writer/director Kang Dong-hun (Pray, 2020) concerns a haunted house and a haunted family, where mental illness and domestic history merge into one. This hits the ground running, placing a child in harrowing peril, and its twisted narrative is sufficiently deft in recombining its borrowed tropes to wrong-foot even the most genre savvy.
Anton Bitel