Reviewed by Soh Yun-Huei

Director: Yu Sang-gon
Writing Credits: Kim Hie-jae, Park Cheol-hie, Yu Sang-gon
Cast: Song Yun-a, Shin Hyeon-jun
Genre: Horror
Country: South Korea
Language: Korean
Year Released: 2004
Runtime: 92 min
Rating: * (out of four stars)

Korean horror has pretty much hit the pits – the same pit that Japanese horror had fallen into a while back. Face is one of the most boring, clichéd and scare-less horror film since… well since Into The Mirror. If you thought you’ve seen it before, it’s because you have. There have been so many long-haired female ghost horror movies (and more coming, judging from recent trailers) that it should be considered a genre of its own – and Face is a particularly unspectacular film in the genre.

Hyun-min (Shin Hyeon-jun) has a day job reconstructing faces from skulls, and he’s darn good at what he does. Unfortunately, his daughter suffers from a rare medical condition, and though she has already had a heart transplant, her condition hasn’t stabilized. His request to resign the job and take care of his child is refused – because there is a serial killer who is dissolving all his victims into nothing but bones, and Hyun-min is needed to reconstruct the faces of the victims. He is reluctant at first, but a long-haired female ghost (dum dum!) starts to haunt him until he takes up the job. He also finds himself having an assistant that he neither asked for nor wants to work with, Sun-young (Song Yun-a), but (of course) an unlikely romance ensues amid the hauntings, which also seem somehow related to his daughter’s predicament. Can Hyun-min discover the secret behind the killings before time runs out for both him and his daughter?

The worst thing about Face is that it is a completely predictable movie – the twist in the tale was readily identifiable less than fifteen minutes into the film, and thereafter Face just chugs along without ever trying to do anything out of the ordinary. Even worse, the film completely abandons the long-haired female ghost halfway through, and what happens after is more a whodunit than a ghost story. Sad to say, even when the long-haired etc. was around, Face served up minimal scares, relying once again on the tried-and-true method of using sudden noises to shock the audience. Been there, did the six-hour tour. It’s astounding that director Yu Sang-gon even bothered with this movie, because no one else should.

Final Word: It’s boring and it’s predictable, and there are far better movies out there to spend your hard-earned money on.