re:mote voices

Title:Doll Master [Inhyeongsa]
Cast: Yu-mi Kim, Eun-kyeong Lim, Hyeong-tak Shim, Ji-young Ok, Hyeong-jun Lim, Yu-mi Jeong, Ka-Yeong Lee
Director: Yong-ki Jeong

A group of young people are invited out to a remote house in the country. A novelist, a photographer, a sculptor, and an energetic school kid. Then there is the male model who has heard about the special project and invited himself along. The guests are there to model for dolls - intricate and startlingly life like items - made by the wheelchair bound doll maker. Of course on arrival at this isolated and creepy house they find that they have no reception on their mobile phones and that every room contains at least one life-size and worryingly sinister doll.

Call it classic or cliché, whichever you prefer, The Doll Master uses established tools of the genre. The house in the middle of nowhere, the group of young folk, who get picked off one by one. The effectiveness of the film is just how creepy the dolls are - women's bodies thrust through walls, or hanging from the ceiling, fingers reaching out of the dark, eyes following your movement. Add to this the talk of objects attaining souls and you have the set up for a chilling little number, for all that it isn't so different from a dozen other Korean horror films.