Voices (2009)

Review by Sean Patterson



"You're next."

The creepy opening to Voices foreshadows a "gotcha" type scare fest. While the movie does offer its share of cheap scares, it suffers from many of the same problems other foreign supernatural horror movies do.
Ga-in Kim is in high school. She is on the fencing team. Everything about her seems normal until she attends a cousin's wedding with her family. The bride falls down at the reception, blood pooling around her head.
While the bride is in the hospital, her parents watch a newscast about a rash of murders perpetrated by close relatives of the victims. I took the foreboding music cue to mean the bride is probably one of those victims and my powers of observation did not fail me: the bride's sister soon stabs her to death in her hospital bed. That murder is quite beautiful, in a way. The room is dark, illuminated only by lightning from the window which throws the scene into high-relief. Blood splatters and covers nearly everything in the room.
Soon after this, Ga-in has a strange dream. In it, she lies in her bed beneath a pool of blood. Not submerged in the blood, but lying under the pool, its surface undulating above her. From under (above?) that surface a mangled woman's face appears and tells her that she's next. The pool falls and the blood soaks the room. It's a marvelously well done piece of horror that, unfortunately, isn't followed up on in the rest of the movie.
From then on the people around her become so irrationally angry at Ga-in that they try to kill her. The teacher's pet, her teacher, and even her mother all take a stab at her.
After that it gets murky. Ga-in decides to run away and her father points her to a distant relative who babbles on about a curse. The new kid in school seems to know something about the curse, telling Ga-in not to trust anyone, even herself.
The end comes with revelations I didn't completely understand, but plenty of murder and arson. The first ending, anyway. Voices suffers from what I'm coining MES, Multiple Endings Syndrome. If I were a director I suppose it would be hard to part from all the wonderful endings I had filmed. But I would hope I would have the fortitude to choose just one for the sake of the movie. The number of endings is almost always inversely proportional to their cinematic power.
As always, I'm wary of translations in foreign horror films. I suspect the distributor for these movies in English speaking countries chooses the most cost-efficient subtitle company. For example, how does "pleading the fifth" make any sense in South Korea? I know the character did not say that, and now I wonder how much nuance I'm missing from the rest of the dialogue. And when we're talking about curses and enigmatic voices, nuance is key.
This is fairly standard supernatural Asian horror, and it reminds me heavily of a movie I reviewed a few weeks back called Carved. These flicks are a great reminder that good horror doesn't have to throw gore in your face, and that blood can look pretty if shot correctly. However, they can also sometimes be an exercise in patience.