re:mote voices

Title:Bunshinsaba
Cast: Gyu-ri Kim, Se-eun Lee, Yu-ri Lee, Seong-min Choi, Jeong-yun Choi, Yu-jin Lim
Director: Byeong-ki Ahn

The all day FrightNight festival at the Glasgow Film Festival continued with another Korean film, though originally it should have been the only Korean film of the day if the planned Japanese film had turned up. While Bunhongsin reminds of the Phone, the director of the Phone offers us Bunshinsaba, which reminds of Whispering Corridors.

Yoo Jin has moved from Seoul to small town Korea, and is being bullied by the xenophobic local school girls. Joined by a couple of the other girls at school who are recieving similar treatment, they use the ritual of Bunshinsaba. Which summons the spirits of the dead, a ritual similar to the use of the Ouija Board, which is the title the film has been given in English. The spirit they summon is of another school girl, one who died 30 years before. The first girl to die is found in the seat that previous girl sat in, and thus it starts. There were 4 names on the list that the spirit was set upon, and they are picked off, one by one. But once those 4 are dead, will the spirit of vengeance be satisfied?

Bunshinsaba has parallels with 1999's Whispering Corridors, since both are Korean films set in girl's school. Both feature the return of a girl who died in the past, and the arrival on a new teacher. There are also similar scenes of scary going ons in dark school corridors. However, the film opens up past that initial plot, the dead girl from 30-years prior came from more than just school girl excesses, rather this was a village wide campaign. The girl from the past and her mother were rumoured to have some kind of psychic powers, a fact that brought suspicion upon them. The fact that the village was isolated and was hostile to strangers made that tension more intense.

Again, like many of these films Bunshinsaba has a variety of elements that we have seen before. Ideas of reincarnation, posession used to express hostile school systems and mistrust of strangers. There are a couple of scenes that particularly give Bunshinsaba its own identity, which is always a good thing, enabling it to avoid entirely disappearing in a sea of Asian horror.