Pitched somewhere between Jung Bum-shik’s Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum (2018) and Jo Ba-reun’s The Grotesque Mansion (2021), Sim Deok-geun’s haunted building horror has shaman’s son Seo Do-jin (in 2002) and a trio of college students (in 1996) both entering an abandoned and cursed community centre where many murders and suicides have occurred, and both repeatedly crossing each other’s paths despite being there eight years apart.

Merging different spatiotemporal realities over a single, recurring night, and featuring a grudge-holding ghost whose dissociative identity disorder confounds the usual rules of possession and exorcism, this is a disorienting, increasingly frantic affair, as these disparate characters all race to survive their respective nights. Full of oppressively nightmarish atmosphere and irrational incident, this is a wild, bewildering ghost train, transgressing a door that should never be opened.

Anton Bitel