- Ha Jung-woo stars as a widowed architect whose daughter vanishes – the latest in a string of disappearances of young children in the area
- The opening is suitably unsettling but the film almost immediately loses the viewer’s attention as unsympathetic characters behave implausibly at every turn
1.5/5 stars
A pair of impactful sequences open The Closet, the new supernatural chiller from first-time director Kim Kwang-bin. The film begins with home video footage of an exorcism from 1998, in which a female shaman dies horribly at the hands of an unseen presence.
The second, now in the present day, sees widowed architect Sang-won (Ha Jung-woo) happen upon a dead fawn lying in the road. Its traumatised mother looks on helplessly as the carcass of her offspring is picked apart by a murder of ravenous crows.
The scene offers heavy-handed, yet effective foreshadowing of Sang-won's plight, after his own daughter, Ina (Heo Yool), is abducted by a malevolent spirit living in the wardrobe of their new, and secluded, home.
Unfortunately, the film loses its way almost immediately, as unsympathetic characters behave implausibly at every turn, and Kim fails to sustain the unsettling atmosphere of his opening.
Sang-won's behaviour defies logic from the outset. After losing his wife in a car accident, he moves his traumatised daughter to a large house in the woods. No sooner have they moved in than Sang-won installs a nanny whom he has never met, and leaves for the city to oversee an important construction project. Ina starts acting up almost immediately, the nanny bails, and Ina disappears into the closet.
Enter exorcist Kyung-hoon (Kim Nam-gil), son of the woman we saw killed in the film's opening sequence, who tells Song-wan that Ina is just the latest in a long line of young children who have gone missing in the area, and that his new home has a storied history of spooky behaviour going back decades.
Kim attempts to ground his flimsy supernatural shenanigans with a more respectable and worthy subplot highlighting societal ills, as all of the missing children appear to have been the victims of parental neglect or abuse.
Sang-won's growing realisation of his own inadequacies and culpability in his daughter's disappearance is offset by Kyung-hoon's overwhelming desire to emulate his mother, complete the job she was unable to finish, and banish the spirit.
The Closet suggests a familiarity with horror classics as diverse as Henry James' The Turn of the Screw and Tobe Hooper's Poltergeist. Kim the screenwriter recognises the inherent terror in haunted houses and creepy children, but his talented cast is left flailing, as Kim the director proves incapable of conjuring a single significant scare of his own.
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