★★★☆☆
A road-view crew reshoots a haunted reservoir and gets pulled under: the biggest Korean horror hit in a generation.
Lee Sang-min’s feature debut arrives trailing extraordinary numbers – the highest-grossing Korean horror film of all time, the first in eight years to pass two million admissions, and the strongest domestic-horror opening since Exhuma.
Its hook is playful and smart: when a ghostly head appears in the street-view images of the remote Salmokji reservoir, the company is pressured to reshoot, and PD Han Su-in (Kim Hye-yoon, fresh off Lovely Runner) volunteers – her superior having already vanished at the site days earlier.
What follows leans on a mulgwishin, the Korean water ghost, and a local belief that the reservoir sits atop an old graveyard; crucially, the spirits here don’t chase so much as lure, drawing the crew toward the water while they insist, glassy-eyed, that they’re fine. Lee wrings a steady dread from that central idea, helped by sound design built from small-but-wrong noises: tapping stones, shifting water, splashes that match nothing on screen, rather than orchestral stings – and mashed good use of the real Yesan reservoir as a shooting location.
Lee delivers classic K-horror tropes with real aplomb, and so this one of the better examples the country has produced this decade. The reservations are familiar: the characters are a little underwritten, while the back half turns slightly repetitive and predictable once the rules are clear. But as creeping, atmospheric folk-horror it earns its phenomenon status.
Salmokji: Whispering Water played at Tubi FrightFest in London.