Muoi: The Legend of the Portrait (2007)
Review by Jeffery J. Timbrell
There is a desperate race to find the ‘next great horror icon’ and it’s not just going on in North America.
The Ring’s infectious Sadako has run her course and returned to her watery grave, the cat-yowling children of The Grudge have settled down and are increasingly silent, the ghost-seeing vision of The Eye has gone blind, Takashi Miike and Park-Chan Wook are moving their talent for the strange and bizarre into children’s movies, absurdist films, musicals and comedy.
Asian horror needs a new hero; a new twist on the old myth of the terrifying spirit out for revenge. Enter: one down-on-her-luck author named Yoon Hee (An Jo from The Wishing Stairs) starving for a way to break out and become a successful writer. Having not published a book for years, Yoon Hee turns to the ghost stories being sent to her by her former best friend who lives in Vietnam (Cha Ye Ryeon from A Bloody Aria). These ghost stories tell the tragic and terrifying tale of a haunted Portrait and a vengeful spirit. A story from Vietnamese folklore that Yoon Hee is convinced will be the ‘next big thing’ in horror and a sure-fire ticket to stardom. But the deeper Yoon Hee sinks into the mythology of the dreaded Muoi and her portrait, the more she begins to draw connections and parallels with the present day, her friend and their past history together. A stranger in a strange land, Yoon Hee must unravel the secrets of the spirit of Muoi and confront the demons of her own past, or she might just end up finding herself face to face with the “next big thing” in horror.
Muoi: The Legend of the Portrait is a nicely shot and remarkably clever joint Korean/Vietnamese production that is very ambitious by modern horror standards. The conventional Asian horror staples are missing, subdued or parodied in the Portrait. The kooky movements and moaning Kabuki faces are gone and the cute and innocent girls squealing as they’re chased down hallways are also missing. In their stead is an intelligent and even empowering story about two women, an event that tore their friendship apart, and their mutual connection with a darkness that threatens to consume them both.
Muoi is head-lined by two great performances that help support a script that feels like a cross between Wes Craven’s New Nightmare and Clive Barker’s Candyman.
The film is never really terrifying, all of the chills and thrills are very subtle and almost hallucinogenic, although Muoi has some of the trademark conventional Asian ghost sequences and there is one excellent bit with a piece of loose wallpaper that feels like old school Mario Bava and pays off in a big way in the finale. For the most part, Muoi delivers its scares through characterization, dialogue and moments of guilt and suspicion; which is a stark contrast from the norm and shows a higher level of maturity than the usual cavalcade of creepy ghosts staring out of windows.
There is a guilty, almost-Hitchcockian thrill as the outsider Yoon Hee investigates the dark, dirty little secrets of this foreign country; rummaging through their buried stories all the while realizing she doesn’t belong and that she’s head deep in something she cannot hope to understand. While at that same time she is completely powerless to stop. She’s driven by her own ambition while her ambition is a source of guilt that attracts the darkness to her.
Yoon Hee is caught in a loop between what she wants, and what she has to do to survive. She sees what’s coming, deep down she knows it’s real, she knows the conventions of the genre, but she is pulled along by her curiosity and a fearsome sense of discovery. She buys a plane ticket to leave, she tries to ignore it, she tries to escape, Yoon Hee even mocks it.
After hearing how Muoi was brutalized, crippled and had her face burned with acid, Yoon Hee makes a comment that ‘Muoi’s pain isn’t significant enough to interest readers’ and she tells her friend that she’ll have to fabricate or exaggerate the real story to sell it. All the while Yoon Hee’s fabrication of past events and her callous exploitation of someone’s pain is exactly what brought her to this situation in the first place.
Funny thing about Yoon Hee’s line regarding Muoi being crippled and mutilated, it could just as easily have come from the lips of a studio executive in charge of making a horror movie.
Even as a treaty on the genre of horror movies, there is a lesson to be learned in The Portrait. From a creative standpoint and from a personal standpoint: it is not a good idea to wallow in nostalgia and constantly try to dig up the past to harvest it for fun and profit. Some things are dead and buried for a reason. This is a good lesson to learn.
Too much of horror fandom (and fandom in general, let’s be fair) is coming off as ridiculous brand-loyalty these days. That kind of crap is the exact reason why every radio station is stuck playing songs your parents used to listen to 40 years ago.
Do you really want that for horror movies?
The entire selling point of some of the more recent, supposedly against-the-grain horror films is not that they’re terrifying, well-written, intelligently directed or tell a good story…but that they’re a throwback to the ‘good old days’ of the 1980s.
C’mon folks. You deserve better than that.
It’s time to get back to basics.
Muoi’s director and writer Kim Tae-kyeong realizes that. He’s not interested in paying homage, he’s not interested in creating ‘the next big thing’; he doesn’t want to win the ‘how big is your splatter dick’ contest.
He just wants to tell a good story. He just wants to make a good horror movie.
And that is a genre trend I will always get behind.
Popularity: 12% [?]
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