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Voice: Unrated
R1 - America - Genius Products Review written by and copyright: Jeremiah Chin (14th July 2008). |
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The Film
 “Voice” (2005) is the latest in a South Korean horror film series that all revolve around an all-girls school and feature bizarre or supernatural elements. After seeing the cover for the DVD I was hoping to see some fingers coming out of heads, some “blood-curdling” terror and gore like the box blurbs and art promise, but the film is incredibly tame in terms of gore and the story isn’t too interesting for me either. The film begins with the death of Yeong-eon (Kim Ok-bin) a star singer in her music class, she dies one night while staying after school from having a piece of sheet music thrown into her throat. But her voice lives on…(spooky). Yeong-eon becomes a ghost who haunts up her school, only her best friend Seon-min (Seo Ji-hye) can hear her and together they try to solve the mystery of who killed her. Meanwhile some other mysterious deaths go on in the school, including the music teacher and many students speculate that the music teacher and Yeong-eon were lovers. As the mystery unfolds, it becomes there’s much more to Yeong-eon’s character than her ghost lets on, but it gets really convoluted. Eventually it’s revealed that Yeong-eon wasn’t a very good person for the most part in real life, this shocking twist really doesn’t do much though because the tension building up to it and the characterization all seem off and at times a bit forced. There’s a relationship with her mother who killed herself, but suddenly there’s speculation that Yeong-eon killed her mother, and it just feels a bit thrown-together. Visually the film is really underwhelming, there’s some interesting red lighting in some of the scenes that look nice, but there are others where the image gets muddied just by the quality of the film rather than an artistic intent. Equan Choe (also spelled Choe Ik-Hwan)’s directing also leaves something to be desired, this is Choe’s first outing as a director and a writer, and they’ve picked up on a lot of the traditions and standards in the generic-shocking-Asian-horror-genre, but Choe hasn’t added much of a visual flare or style of their own. There’s also a bit of the “Quantum Leap” (1989) effect in the movie where they have the “Hey, I’m a ghost/hologram/not-really-here” effects shot where the main character will pass through something early on to set up the ghostliness, but then act completely normal for the most part and not use the effect anymore. (Some spoilers about the ending) The ultimate twists, turns and reveals of “Voice” not only seem forced, but continue with other South Korean horror films like “The Wig” (2005) in presenting the evil psycho-killer gay/lesbian ex-lover, who may or may not have been jilted. While there’s something to be said about the rising prominence of Gay and Lesbian characters, even as villains, there’s a definite lack of gay and lesbian protagonists to balance it out. In the end the lack of character development surrounding Yeong-eon’s evil-side seems to simply be associated with her lesbian relationship with the music teacher. Since her evil side that kills people and her lesbian side are both revealed to the viewer at about the same time, there’s a subtle or not so subtle association between the two. Overall, “Voice” didn’t really deliver on a lot of gore or terror promised on the packaging. There’s nothing too shocking in terms of gore and the film isn’t all that frightening in terms of jumps and shocks since much of it has been done before. Most disappointingly for a film that seems to emphasize sound and music as a plot element, neither of these really increases the tension or mood of the film.
Video
“Voice” is shown in a 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen aspect ratio and wavers between good and poor video quality. Based on the lighting the quality of film seems different, the brightly lit scenes come through crisp and clear while the darker the scene gets the muddier and grainy the film quality becomes. In a couple of scenes there are some fairly large film artifacts left on these scenes as well. Stylistically, these video quality shifts don’t fit the artistic tone that Choe attempts through the movie and are more a part of the transfer.
Audio
The Korean Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo audio comes through clean, but is an example of where more could be done. There’s moments when Yeong-eon is first trying to be heard and there’s some interesting sound distortion, but it doesn’t go much further than that in playing with the sound of the film. Otherwise the levels in the movie sound fine, and the audio comes through really cleanly. Subtitles are presented in English.
Extras
Genius Products presents “Voice” only with a behind-the-scenes featurette and a theatrical trailer. Below is a closer look. The “Behind-The Scenes" featurette runs for 23 minutes and 48 seconds and is fairly hard to watch. There are no interviews with the cast or director to voice-over this long compilation of plain on-set footage. There’s on-set talk with the actors about what they are doing in a scene, but none of it’s really an interview as the actors are talking with people on-set and not to an audience; they’re asking for more blood for their death or commenting on how they’re going to try a scene over again. Not really worth watching even if you moderately enjoyed the movie. The theatrical trailer runs for 2 minutes and 25 seconds.
Overall
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