Face
       
        

Director:  Yoo Sang-gon
Year: 2004
Rating: 5.0

Country: Korea

This Korean horror film is a jumbled mess that throws in bits and pieces from the Sixth Sense to Ju-on to every long-haired female ghost film from that era. It's all over the place - a ghost story, a police investigation, a sick child, a serial killer, body parts - that never really comes together. Yet I enjoyed it to some degree. It is such a mess that I was curious as to where the hell it was going. And how it would get there. I am not sure that it did. Lots of jump scares and ghosts flitting by in the background or the corner of your eye. This is so old that the ancient Greeks must have had it in their plays. Yet directors keep doing it because I guess it works. At least with me. Even when I know it is coming.



Hyeon-Min (Shin Hyeon-jun) reconstructs faces from skulls so that the police can identify the dead. But he leaves his job in order to take care of his small daughter who is beta-allergic and has had a heart transplant. But the dead demand to be identified and suddenly ghosts are all around scaring the pants off of him. A very pretty assistant (Song Yun-ah) from the police shows up at his doorstep with a skull and a smile to persuade him to go to work and she will help. More to assuage the ghost, he does. At the same time bodies are showing up after having been melted and the cops are investigating. They later connect up. Ghosts are funny creatures. They can imitate Ju-on, freak you out, take human form - but they can't just tell you who they are and who killed them. It would make things so much simpler. It must be a union rule.