Marui Video (2023)

Original title: 마루이 비디오

Large parts of Marui Video supposedly consist of footage shot by a small documentary crew, seized by the police and only later made public, as is tradition. The fictional filmmakers stumble upon rumours about a curious “Marui Video” from a couple of decades ago. “Marui Video” is apparently the term used by Busan’s prosecutor’s office for film footage too gruesome to be made public. It shows a man brutally murdering his girlfriend in an inn under very curious circumstances that any regular horror movie viewer will easily identify as signs of possession. There’s also the face of a man visible in a mirror for a couple of seconds who can’t possibly be there. The video itself is supposed to be cursed, as well. At least, it is impossible to copy it by any other way but filming off the screen when it is playing, and the archive where it is harboured has a case of rather curious mould growing on its ceiling, which strikes everyone involved as rather unnatural and creepy.

The video and the murder case lead our intrepid investigators (predominantly a producer/director played by Seo Hyun-woo and a reporter played by Jo Min-kyung) on the trail of another, related murder which also has several aspects that never seem to fit quite right into a rational world. The further down they crawl the rabbit hole of the cases, the more their own lives are infected with strangeness: things in their office move around by themselves, electronic devices develop a mind of their own, and eventually, one of them will begin to suffer from a mental break-down of the possession kind. Fortunately, characters in a South Korean movie are not afraid to visit a shaman when the supernatural comes calling; unfortunately, shamanistic intervention doesn’t necessarily always work.

Most of the POV horror movies I’ve seen in the last half a year or so have been of the cheerful and ultra-cheap variant of the genre, where fuzziness is a given, pixelling out faces is a sign of authenticity, and wavering hand camera work the name of the game. So a sub-genre entry like Yoon Joon-hyeong’s Marui Video comes as a bit of a culture shock, for it was clearly made with a budget, something that comes hand in hand with actual, professional acting, a coherent script, and a visual language that uses all kinds of authentic looking yet high resolution found footage devices as well as a lot of material that looks as if it were shot by the professional filmmakers the characters are supposed to be. There’s still some wild camerawork, but this is reserved for some particularly intense scenes where this makes logical and – more importantly – dramatic sense.

Though I love some crazy low budget/low res POV shenanigans, and find the low budget realm the natural habitat of POV horror, when used as efficiently and intelligently as here (or in something like The Medium, which I have inexplicably never written about here), a certain slickness can work very well with the sub-genre, still keeping the feeling of authenticity that is part and parcel of POV (unless you’re one of those people who always need to ask why the characters keep filming), and turning it into something closer to a traditional narrative.

Interestingly enough, the type of narrative Marui Video is for large parts of its running time is an investigative one. The film spends much time on the filmmakers trying to solve its mystery as if it were a normal crime, so there’s a pleasant amount of scenes of the characters looking for clues, interviewing witnesses, and attempting to puzzle out the nature of the incidents that created the curse they seem to have stumbled upon. Obviously, this is always interrupted by the escalating supernatural threat surrounding them, which makes both the supernatural and the mundane halves of the film more effective: the former, it grounds in the feeling of reality POV horror is so often great at providing, while it adds a degree of unpredictability to the latter.

Adding to Marui Video’s strengths is how good  it is at showing both of its aspects. The horror sequences are genuinely creepy (and escalate wonderfully from the minor to the inevitable doom), and the central mystery well-constructed. There’s very little about the film I didn’t enjoy.

Fatal Intuition (2015)

aka It’s Him

Original title: 그 놈이다

Jang-woo (Joo Won) and his teenage sister Eun-ji (Ryoo Hye-yeong) live together in a run-down coastal town, where Jang-woo runs the laundry business that once belonged to their parents, who died when Eun-ji was still very young. Consequently, Jang-woo has spent the years after their death as his sister’s replacement parent, clearly loving the kid dearly but rather tending to a very overprotective style of parenting.

Yet still, Jang-woo can’t protect Eun-ji from being murdered. Indeed he has to bear some of the actual responsibility for her death by providing the killer with a choice opportunity for the deed when Jang-woo locks his sister up in their home. The bereaved brother can’t let the death of his sister just stand, and while I usually look rather askance on the whole thing where people try to solve a crime themselves, the local police would probably not be able to catch a killer even if he ran into their office shouting “I’m the killer!” while wearing a placard reading “KILLER! ARREST ME!” around his neck. Jang-woo soon focuses his investigation on the local pharmacist Min (Yoo Hae-jin), one of the few outwardly nice people in a town full of assholes. Jang-woo is assisted by another town pariah, Si-eun (Lee Yoo-Young), who is mistreated by basically everyone she meets during the course of the film because she sees spirits and even has a some clairvoyant abilities. Alas, the only thing she ever sees is peoples’ death. In fact, Si-eun predicted Eun-jin’s death, but, like it always goes for her, couldn’t do anything to change the girl’s fate.

Yoon Joon-hyeong’s thriller with light supernatural elements is a very typical example of the South Korean type of the form, as expected featuring some slick yet not stupid direction, fine performances, and writing that is always at least decent.

Fatal Intuition is not quite as good a film as other examples of the genre from the country: its emotional content tends to drift towards the somewhat too obviously manipulative from time to time, and its use of clichés isn’t quite as clever as it could be, perhaps choosing things useful for narrative mechanics over things true to character or reality a few times too often. Surely, there’s no real need to make the police quite this incompetent and ignorant, for example. This love of the well-worn cliché never gets so bad as to ruin the film, but it tends to stand in the way of it being more than just a slick entertainment (even though there is of course little wrong with a film just being that), and certainly stands in the way of the film saying as much about grief, guilt and obsession - the three things all three main characters are all about - as it could.

Apart from the basic joy of a good thriller plot that is certainly there and accounted for, and the film’s technical achievements, there are other things to like here too: how the killer’s back story turns out to be a choice bit of Korean gothic that also works to turn the guy into a little more than just the monster you’d expect, and which also fits into Si-eun’s ghost visions quite nicely; how the film’s colour scheme turns gialloesque for the finale; or that the most stupid cop among extremely stupid cops gets killed.

That’s not quite enough to turn it into a film you should run out to see, but Fatal Intuition is still very much worth one’s while, the kind of film whose flaws stand out so clearly because the rest of it seems made with such a sure hand.