The Uninvited
Review
This was a massively disappointing horror movie. It revolves around Jung-won, who is an interior designer, and Yun, a woman who suffers from depression and narcolepsy.
Jung-won sees two kids on a subway apparently asleep, and he learns they were actually poisoned by their mother. He keeps seeing the dead kids at his dining table, still asleep/dead. No reason is ever given for why he sees the kids at all, or why he keeps seeing them.
Yun is a woman he ends up becoming non-romantically involved with. She also sees the dead kids, but at least she has a possible reason as her mother was a shaman.
The movie involves Jung-won finding out something very terrible he did when he was very young, Yun's child being killed by a neighbor, and a few scenes which are more yuck than horror.
Jung-won is not really sympathetic at all in the movie. The actor barely acts, most of the time in the first half of the film not really showing any problem with seeing dead kids. There is just so much that makes absolutely no sense in this film that it's not really even worth going into it all.
Special features include The Making of the Uninvited; Reminiscence, an interview with Ji-hyan Jun and shin-yang Park; Abridged: the Uninvited Condensed; a trailer; poster and still galleries; production notes and bios; Korean Horror, an essay, and a special insert card with collectible sticker. Normally, I like to look at all the special features, but this film was so disappointing that I didn't even bother to watch them.
Synopsis
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The film starts out with Jung-won on a subway. A mother gets on the train with two (really cute) little kids. He gets off at the last station, but after he leaves the train he sees the two kids still on it without their mother, but does nothing about it.
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He gets to his apartment and finds a woman doing some kind of work on the ceiling of one of the rooms. (It is absolutely amazing how clean everything is. The subway was sparkling inside and out, and, at least so far, Yung-won's apartment is also sparkling.)
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She (Hee-eun) tells him not to hang out with someone. We find out the woman is his fiancee.
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The next day, the news carries the story about the corpses of two young girls found on a subway, the same ones he saw on the same train as the day before. He's working on a site but is injured when someone drills through the ceiling and things fall on Jung-won.
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He goes back to his apartment and at four in the morning he sees the two dead girls sitting at his table.
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He goes to work the next day, seemingly unaffected by what he saw in his apartment. Apparently they are redoing an old building, but the original blueprints are not very accurate and they are having trouble finding a power line. Jung-won has some kind of psychic abilities since he is able to tell the worker where the power line is.
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Jung-won goes to stay with his father for a while.
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He goes to sleep and suddenly awakes, dressed, on a subway with two trails of cookie crumbs on the floor. He finds the two kids on the train and tries to wake them. He finds them again, burned, and again, awake and walking. It was a nightmare.
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He goes to a mental health clinic to talk to a doctor. He's not going for help, though; he's going to do some work for the doctor and put in another door. He sees a woman coming out of the doctor's office. Later he's driving and sees her fainting while waiting at a street corner to cross.
His fiancee describes how she plans to arrange some lights in a hotel she is working on (she's an interior designer, I guess). Suddenly Jung-won is in a village. He's standing on a grate and sees a body in it, then sees a young boy.
At this point, it's 24 minutes into the film, and I'm getting somewhat annoyed with the film. He's seeing these kids and these dead bodies, but he has absolutely no reaction in his expression or anything else when he sees them. It's like, “Oh, some dead bodies. Oh well. On to other things.” He seems to space out, but the film jumps from that to him somewhere else later and makes no effort to show how long his spacing out lasted, or if the person he was with even noticed.
I will grant that the film is less than an eighth finished, and it will probably take a while to begin to explain things, but, at the moment, this is more confusion than horror.
It turns out the kids mother poisoned them. Later Jung-won returns to his apartment, scared the dead kids will still be at the table, but they aren't there. Suddenly he hears a voice and sees the two kids at the table again. It turns out it's just a dream, though. Jung-won's father seems to be a Catholic priest.
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He gives a ride home to Yun. Then there's a totally unnecessary scene of his seeing a cat that had been run over and the cat is still trying to move. Yuck, not horror. Yun faints and he takes her to his apartment. She is carrying a card that says if someone finds her and she's fainted they are to call a certain number. She sees the kids at the table and think they are his.
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Her husband has come to pick her up and is driving her home when she asks him to stop and let her out. He refuses, and she starts to open the door.
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Later she's appearing in court. (I'm going to skip a lot of the action , and I use that word loosely, in the movie. At the 45 minute mark I'm basically bored by the movie.) She is being questioned about some woman she knows who is on trial. Meanwhile, Jung-won has been going through her medical records and finds out she suffers from hallucinations and depression. She reveals she went to see her friend (who is on trial) and left her kid there with her friend while she went out and got some groceries for her friend.
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When Yun got back, the woman is holding a baby over the railing (sound familiar?) She drops the baby. Jung-won is basically becoming a stalker. He goes through a piece of mail she left in his apartment accidentally, and waits outside the apartment complex until her husband lets her off, having given her a ride from the trial. He tries to find out how she could see the children in his apartment.
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He goes into the psychiatrist's office his group is remodeling and goes through Yun's records. She also suffers from narcolepsy. He finds that some of her sessions with the doctor have been recorded, and he starts listening to one of them. She is standing on her balcony in a rainstorm and sees a woman falling and then faints.
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Later, back to the trial, and the accused woman's husband is testfying. Yun had gone with the woman when she needed to get an MRI. The woman freaks, and we see a scene of her going through a well (ala The Ring), and the woman is lying at the bottom of the well (?) with the baby nursing/biting(?). Anyhow, Yun sees what the woman is seeing and faints.
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Yun's husband is having problems with the fact that she seems to be seeing images of odd things. Stalker Jung goes through Yun's mail. He wants to find out which apartment she is living in. He tries to talk to her but she tells him to go away. Yun meets with her husband's mother and they don't get along well. The mother wants to know how soon Yun will file for divorce. We also find out that it was Yun's baby that was dropped off the ledge (and probably the woman dropped her own off, too.) She faints (again).
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They find Jung's business card in Yun's pocket so they call him to come and help her.
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Jung's fiancee is shopping and spots him helping Yun. We can easily guess where this is leading. He takes Yun to her apartment and she explains about the narcolepsy to him. We find out her mother had visions also. Her mother was a shaman. Jung reveals he inhaled coal dust when he was seven and lost all his memories.
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He tells her about a nightmare where he's young and he sees a toddler run over by a truck (gross; complete with the sound of a popping balloon). The driver sticks the body in a hole under a grate and leaves. Later he's beaten by his father. He manages to set fire to the house, killing his father and his little sister. Apparently these are the memories he had lost.
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Suddenly, it's back to the trial. Meanwhile, Jung's fiancee confronts him with what she saw and plans to take a trip to think things over. Back to the trial, which is suddenly over. The woman is found guilty of murder. Due to her mental state at the time of the crime, though, she's found innocent (???) but sentenced to a state mental facility. (I think the subtitles meant to say something like “not guilty by reason of insanity.”) Yun's husband tries to convince her to stay with him, and Jung goes to his father's church.
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Jung is told about Yun's child being killed. The guilty/innocent woman is being led out by two guards. She sees Yun and calls to her/yells at her (hard to tell), and then falls over the balcony to impact, head-first, on the building's floor.
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Yun calls Jung and he goes to her apartment. She wants to know if he hates her for her showing him his childhood and he says no. Then we find out the woman who fell from the balcony after calling to Yun is not dead (despite the flow of blood from her head.)
He finds a newspaper and learns about the woman having killed a baby. Shortly thereafter the husband shows up. Jung won talks to the man he thought was his father. He gets a call from Yun, asking for him to come to her, that she's in some kind of danger, but he doesn't go. He tells her what she is seeing is due to her illness, totally overlooking the fact that he has seen things, too. He also lies to her, saying his father (the priest) said Jung-won was his real son, when the man had not said anything like that at all when questioned.
He returns to his apartment and smashes the lights above the table where he saw the kids.
The woman that dropped the kid(s) from the balcony is having a flashback. back at Jung's apartment, he smashes the table. He leaves a message for his fiancee to come to his apartment, then gets another call from Yun.
She obviously plans to jump. We see her fall by his balcony, but he's at the other end of his apartment and by the time he gets near the window she's no longer visible.
Later (how much later, I have no idea.) The table is restored.
He's about to eat some soup, looks up, and sees Yun. The two kids are also there.
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