Memento Mori

The two guys who made the extraordinary short Pale Blue Dot have made their first feature, and it’s quite something. Invited to come up with a sequel/follow-up to Park Hi-Hyung’s hit Whispering Corridors, which was about a vengeful spook in a high school for girls, they interviewed 17-year-old girls to get a sense of what it’s like for a young woman to cope with puberty blues in a male-oriented society. And they came up with this story of a ghostly lesbian triangle in which the only real villain – surprise! – is a man. Their decision to go for a generic special-effects climax seems slightly misjudged, but most of their film is closer to reality than fantasy.Min-Ah (Kim Min-Sun) finds a strange diary, capable of arousing hallucinations, kept by two of her senior fellow-students, Hyo-Shin and Shi-Eun, who seem to have an unusually close bond. But Hyo-Shin suddenly kills herself, for no obvious reason, and the entire school is shocked and depressed. Min-Ah, however, starts to feel different. It’s almost as if she’s somehow possessed by the dead girl… (Tony Rayns)