Phone
February 2005 Reviewed by: Rad Bennett Format: DVD	(all ratings out of 5): Overall Enjoyment Picture Quality Packaged Extras Sound Quality

Ghosts are no strangers to Asian cinema. One can look back to 1965’s Japanese-made Kwaidan (Criterion Collection DVD, ***1/2) or 1987’s Chinese Ghost Story from Hong Kong (Media Asia DVD, ***1/2) to see that different Asian countries are steeped in ghost-lore tradition. The latest craze in Asian horror is techno-panic. Videocassettes inhabited by evil spirits became objects of fear in Ringu and in its English remake, The Ring. What Ringu did for VHS, Phone does for the mobile cell phone.

It is not much of a stretch, watching people who seem to have these phones permanently glued into their ears, to come up with the idea that they might be possessed. The way that cell phones seem to control their supposed owners’ lives would lend credence to that idea. Phone goes beyond that simplistic idea. Ji-won Ha stars as Ji-won, a young reporter who has just written a story on youth sex scandals. She is plagued by a series of menacing calls and death-threat emails. She flees to an isolated country house but the calls continue. Her best friend’s six-year-old daughter Young-ju (Seo-woo Eun) picks up the phone by accident, and before you can say "Linda Blair," she is possessed, transformed into a foul-mouthed brat who has a sexual attraction to her father.

I can’t tell you any more without spoiling the surprises for you. And surprises there are, through skillful camera work and music played against type. After seeing this movie, you will never quite hear the Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony the same way. And you will certainly want to take that Moonlight Sonata ring tone off your phone! It is not a great horror movie, but it is a very entertaining one and quite scary at times, without having to delve into gratuitous gore. The film is character driven and the strong characters in it are all women. Ji-won Ha is excellent in the starring role, but it is See-woo Eun who steals the show as the little girl. She can go from innocent to vixen in a heartbeat. Her range is extraordinary for one so young.

The video is quite good; many scenes are crisp and clean with true color. Other scenes are cast in greens or blues, presumably for effect. The sound is quite transparent yet packs plenty of punch when needed. Surround effects draw the listener into the movie and heighten its terror. The extras are quite different from those found with American releases. The behind-the-scenes featurettes actually show the actors and crew at work, without the promotional backslapping found in most English releases.

Phone is a Korean film and it is one of the first releases in a new series from Tartan called Asia Extreme. According to press materials, all releases will be given new video transfers and both Dolby Digital and DTS 5.1 audio treatment. The other initial release is from Japan, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Doppelgänger. Planned for later in 2005 are two more from South Korea, A Tale of Two Sisters and R Point.

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