Jeong Yong-ki’s Korean tale of the supernatural draws from a deep well of J-horror influences. Anton Bitel reports:
When Kim Na-yeong (Kim Bo-ra), a reporter for a click-harvesting gossip site, announces that she intends to investigate an old well hidden beneath a train station where several people have recently died under mysterious circumstances, her editor Ms Mo (Kim Soo-jin) responds, “I’m not feeling it.”
Mo has her reasons for closing down this avenue of enquiry, but there is also an element of self-consciously weary metacommentary to her words. For that haunted well brings The Ghost Station just a little too close to Hideo Nakata’s influential Ring (1998), as does the curse associated with it, leading, if it is not passed on, to inevitable death. The connection is cemented by the presence of Ring‘s original screenwriter Hiroshi Takahashi, here co-writing with Lee So-yeong. This may be an adaptation of Horang’s Korean webtoon Ok-su Station Ghost (2011), but Jeong Yong-ki’s live-action feature draws deep from the, er, well of J-horror, and even features the implacable ‘grudge’, and the creepy ghost kid(s), from Takashi Shimizu’s Ju-on (2002) and its many associated films.
When Na-yeong, desperate for a story to catch fire online and pay off her legal costs, begins looking into the weird accidents and suicides around the Ok-su Station, she is helped and sometimes hindered by station worker Woo-won (Kim Jae-hyun), funeral director Yeom (Kim Kang-il) and victims’s sister Tae-ho (Park Jae-han), all of whom will, along with Na-yeong herself, acquire at one point or another the bodily scratch marks that signify impending doom, as wronged, long-dead orphans lash out against the living.
Here, the children’s otherworldly revenge will eventually be matched by Na-yeong’s own, as their desire for recognition, and hers to tell their story, merge to find a common enemy in someone who has sought to cover things up. Along the way there are surreal death set-pieces, freaky spectres appearing from every which angle, and one unnerving sequence where a character’s smartphone camera keeps visibly shifting its auto-focus onto something approaching that otherwise cannot be seen.
Still, The Ghost Station is an inescapably derivative work, as haunted as its characters by the influence of the past – and the ‘historic’ scandals that it disinters might have more impact if they had a grounding in any sort of reality. What it does nail, though, is the inanity of modern, hit-hungry online journalism, which can prove no less viral than a ghostly curse.
The Ghost Station had its UK première on Fri 25th Aug at FrightFest
Anton Bitel writes at Projected Figures, LWL and Sight & Sound.
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