Product: The Uninvited (2003)
Rating: 5.0
Outstanding Cryptic, Atmospheric Horror
One of the best and eeriest examples of atmospheric horror ever made, "The Uninvited" has been criticized by some for being too slow, but in my mind the pacing is perfect for this particular story. On the way home on the subway train one night, a man (Shin-Yang Park) is the last off the train except for two children who he assumes are sleeping. The next day he's horrified to hear that on a subway train the bodies of two dead children were discovered; subsequently he starts to see those very children sitting at his kitchen table in the same slumped, lifeless posture he saw them in on the subway. With no one else able to see them, he assumes he's having a mental breakdown until a chance encounter with a young woman named Yun (Ji-Hyun Jun, listed on this DVD as Gianna Jun) who, upon entering his apartment, can also see the children. Yun has herself been in a deeply unbalanced state over the past year, since a terrible tragedy in which she lost her own child. Here is where the movie really starts to delve into the strange and scary, as events move forward while flashbacks also go into Yun's past and what happened there. The meaning behind alot of events is ambivalent, leaving the viewer able to interpret things in more than one way - for example,the true nature of one of the main characters remains very cloudy: tragic victim or something much more sinister and disturbing? The open-to-interpretation theme works extremely well, as it has in a number of other Asian horror movies. The acting is award-worthy, with Ji-Hyun Jun in particular standing out, the overall production excellent, and a great musical score. With some terrific jolts amongst the deeply simmering atmosphere, the horror builds right to the last frame and holds on deeply even as the credits roll and the possibilities of what really happened sink in. A+