Black House (2007)
Review by Jeffery J. Timbrell
Black House, the latest horror movie hit from Korea, is a film about psychopaths and the insurance companies that love them.
No, wait.
Black House is the story of a timid and well-meaning insurance agent Jun-Oh (Hwang Jeong-min of Shiri and A Bittersweet Life) who becomes a witness to the suicide of a seven year old boy. Having lost his own younger brother to suicide as a child, Jun-Oh obsesses over the boy’s death, and becomes increasingly certain the child was murdered. Stalked by the boy’s deranged father demanding compensation and facing an escalating level of harassment in weird phone calls and decapitated pets, Jun-Oh realizes he may not be dealing with a simple insurance scam, but a very dangerous and manipulative serial killer.
Black House is a movie that could easily become a runaway hit in North American theaters. It follows the successful pattern of films like Rear Window and Pacific Heights, where a likable, average everyday person ends up face to face with a bonafide psychopathic monster.
The first half of Black House is simplistic, slick and frightening. It doesn’t rely on action movie editing, gimmicks or homage. It’s just pure back to basics storytelling. Black House starts off by quickly defining the main character by contrasting his naive, honest personality against the colorful environment of insurance frauds. Through the eyes of Jun-Oh, his likable and meek demeanor and everyday life, we learn about workers purposefully cutting off limbs and fingers to collect money, doctors making false claims for friends to set them up as patients, and psychopaths who go that extra mile to cash in on human lives for fun and profit.
The desolate setting where Jun-Oh witnesses the boy’s suicide is a neighborhood that oozes dread. Everything about the background feels alien, rundown and corrupt, setting the tone for the rest of the film’s disturbing events and dropping hints at the horrors yet to come.
Hwang Jeong-min gives a strong leading man performance that reminded me of some of the better work of Dustin Hoffman; where the actor infuses the character with a fine balance of vulnerability and credibility. The role of Jun-Oh doesn’t feel like acting from Hwang, it feels like a personality that’s been lived in for awhile and it comes off as very genuine. Hwang Jeong-min’s performance and his believable relationship and history gives a lot of weight and a heightened dimension to the weaker “thriller” aspects that dominate the second half of the movie.
Black House’s opening feels refreshing and intoxicating for the exact same reason it’s ending feels cliché and disappointing. Black House is like a movie with a bad case of bipolar disorder. It begins so grounded and so hyper-real that the escalating confrontation and inevitable conflict between Jun-Oh and the psychopath is truly horrifying. It’s like watching a normal guy, who could be anybody in the world, just accidentally bumping into and becoming the center of attention of a bonafide monster. It is something we can imagine happening to any of us, so it resonates powerfully.
The second half of Black House is a cliché ridden Hollywood slasher flick, complete with a lip-licking (seemingly immortal) villain, ridiculous acts of heroism (and healing from mortal injuries), and an ending confrontation that is so contrived and cheesy it feels like something out of a bad Friday the 13th movie.
The first half of Black House is like Silence of the Lambs or Seven; the second half of Black House feels like a direct to video Ashley Judd crime thriller.
Gah.
I give a lot of low-budget movies respect and props, in particular B movies, because they surprise me more than any other type of film. I let my guard down for B movies, I realize that I’m watching something that’s mostly for fun, so when they are intelligent or sophisticated they genuinely surprise me. It’s like getting chocolate cookies and then realizing they come with free oral sex from a gorgeous person of your liking. You don’t see it coming, but afterward you feel compelled to tell all your friends about it.
On the other hand, when something tells me that it’s going to be mature and serious and very intelligent, I approach the film from the perspective of enjoying it as an intellectual experience. I expect serious and topical movies to not resort to simplistic platitudes, I expect to be challenged artistically, morally, or in the very least culturally. Give me something to think about. That’s what I ask.
I often find myself let-down and thoroughly disappointed with these kinds of movies. I think a lot of “serious” movies are overblown Hallmark cards with immature, irresponsible, vacuous and pompous messages that are better suited for the latest book of The Bernstein Bears, instead of a film for adults. I’m known for being harsher on better movies because, to put it frankly: I expect better from them.
Black House is a case in point. The fact that the last thirty minutes of Black House share the same screen as the first thirty minutes is nothing short of absurd to me. The opening and the finale of Black House are so vastly different in tone and execution that they could have easily worked as two completely different movies, but when brought together as a single film, fall collectively on their face.
The conclusion of Black House feels like it was phoned in, like everyone backed away from the subject matter and decided to do a conventional, gory, serial killer slasher flick, complete with false endings, deus ex machina and more horror movie clichés than a Fangoria convention.
I can’t help but feel like Black House was a real loss of potential.. There’s a truly classic horror movie here in Black House, the story, characters and atmosphere are picture perfect at times, and there is a classic horror movie performance here as well.
Unfortunately for Black House, somewhere along the lines, on the way to making a great horror movie, somebody flinched and the whole thing ran off into the ridiculous conventions of crowd-pleasing, lowest common denominator, horror/action slasher flicks.
This is one foreign movie that I hope does get a chance in the remake process. It deserves one.
Black House with the right cast, the right script and the right vision could be the next big thing in horror films. As it stands, it’s a confusing, effective if terribly flawed horror movie.
This is the second time Black House has been adapted to the big screen from a Japanese novel by Yusuke Kishi called Kuroi since 1999. The original Japanese film failed for many reasons similar to the Korean adaptation.
Who knows, maybe the third time’s the charm?
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