Korean movies have made another hit.
The post-90s director Li Congxian's debut work "Telephone" was launched on the Internet on November 27, gaining a good reputation, and more than 12,000 people on Douban have scored a score of 7.8 points, which is very surprising.
Written by Lee Chung-hyun and Park Ji-eun, screenwriter of "You from the Stars," the film is a suspenseful thriller that tells a cross-story.
Jeon Jong-seok and Park Shin-hye, two popular actresses after the 90s, the two fall in love and kill each other in the film, and each round reverses the plot 180 degrees, which is both unexpected and very enjoyable.
One
The plot reverses, reverses, reverses again, can't see the end, can't guess the result
A girl adopted by a witch
The story of the film takes place in 2020, when due to her mother's illness and hospitalization, the beautiful woman Kim So-yeon (played by Park Shin-hye) returns to her family's villa in the countryside.
Shuyan has a strained relationship with her mother, when she was a child, there was a fire in her home, her father Jin Jiongkui was killed in the fire, Shuyan was also burned to the ground, she always believed that her mother's negligence led to the fire.
On the way home, Shuyan's mobile phone was lost, and she had to find an old phone in the villa to use, and after connecting it, she found that this phone frequently received a woman's distress call.
At first, Shuyan didn't pay attention, thinking that someone had made a mistake, but then she found out that the woman who called was from 1999, and it was a girl named Oh Young-sook (played by Jeon Jong-sui) who had lived in the villa 21 years ago.
Shuyan found a hidden basement in the villa, and found a diary in it, which was left by Wu Yingshu.
Through this diary and Shuyan's personal visits, she soon learned the story of what happened to Yingshu.
Young-sook's parents suffered misfortune when she was very young, and she was adopted by a witch. Her adoptive mother regarded Yingshu as a demon, often using her to "practice" various exorcism rituals, and she usually ate strange things such as grassroots.
Shu-yeon is sympathetic to Young-sook, and after a period of exchange, the two use a telephone line to travel through time and space to establish a close relationship.
Young-sook's adoptive mother wants to sell the villa to Shu-yeon's father, Kim Kyung-kyu, and once Kyung-kuei brought the family to see the house, which gave Young-sook an inspiration, and she felt that she could change history and keep the fire in Shu-yeon's house from happening.
So on November 27, 1999, Young-sook sneaked out of her house and took a car to Shuyan's home at No. 374, Jiuyi 2-dong, Gwangjin-gu, Seoul, and asked her to close the stove where she cooked things in time.
This changed the original history, Shuyan's father survived, the scars on her body were gone, and Shuyan's home was fundamentally changed, becoming richer than before.
Shu-yeon and Young-sook's closeness also goes further, but she soon discovers that Young-sook will be killed by her adoptive mother on December 29, 1999.
In order not to let Yingshu suffer misfortune, she also told Yingshu about this matter. As a result, history changed again, and Young-sook stabbed her adoptive mother to death in a counter-killing and put the body in the refrigerator of the family.
Young-sook is actually a natural murderous girl, and her adoptive mother thinks that she is possessed by demons, so she often has to "exorcise" her.
The death of her adoptive mother completely liberated Yingshu, and her murderous nature was also revealed. When Park Sung-ho, a neighbor who delivers strawberries, accidentally finds a body in the refrigerator, Young-sook has to kill him.
On Shuyan's timeline, she also discovers that sung-ho, a neighbor who runs a strawberry farm, has suddenly disappeared from sight, only to realize that she has made a serious mistake.
Shu-yeon thinks that if she refuses to answer Young-sook's phone again, she can avoid Young-sook from killing other people, but she is wrong, and this move not only angers Young-sook from 21 years ago, but also invites her revenge.
On December 11, 1999, young Shu-yeon followed her father, Jiong Kyu, to the villa to talk to Young-sook's mother about buying a house.
Young-sook let the father and daughter into the house, then she killed Jiong-kuei, took Xiao Shuyan to the basement and locked up, and then she called Shuyan in 2020.
In order to avoid legal punishment, Young-sook came up with a brilliant idea, as long as she can know what evidence the police used to convict her, and then find and destroy the evidence, she can get away with it.
So she threatened to force Shuyan, who was kidnapped, to find evidence of a police conviction for her 21 years later.
Shuyan had no choice but to sneak into the police station by night and steal the police's 1999 case-solving notes.
From this note, Shu-yeon sees and informs Young-sook that the key piece of evidence was the dagger used in the murder, so Young-sook finds and destroys the evidence so that she is not caught by the police.
From the notes, Shuyan also saw that her mother had gone to the villa with the police to check because of the disappearance of her husband and daughter, and had used the telephone. Shu-yeon uses the phone in the villa to contact her mother 21 years ago, informing her that she will be attacked by Young-sook.
Because of Shuyan's phone call, her mother was wary of Young-sook. After Young-sook kills the police, her mother fights with Young-sook to protect Joo-yeon, and finally both fall from the upper floor.
History has also changed again because of this change, and as to whether the final outcome is evil or not, Pigo will sell a pass here, no spoilers.
There is also a reversal at the end of the film, which surprises everyone, and the biggest selling point of this movie is the constant reversal of the plot, and the ending cannot be guessed until the last moment.
Two
An adaptation that goes beyond the original
Pigo has seen many cross-over films with similar themes, such as "Back to the Future", "Black Hole Frequency", "Mirage", etc. Are all such routines, and the most similar to this film is "Overtime Call".
In the 2011 British thriller Call in Time, the heroine Mary Ki receives a call from a strange woman named Rose in the late 1970s in an old apartment. Because Mary's inadvertent words led Rose to kill her husband, Rose, who was close to a nervous breakdown, set her sights on Mary, causing a series of accidents.
The story of this film can be said to copy the origin plot of "Overtime Call", but it has also been fully adapted to make it appear more "localized".
What is the "localization" of Korean cinema? In a word, it can be summed up: Europe and the United States emphasize love, and South Korea emphasizes family affection. Due to the long-term division of the Korean Peninsula, Korean movies always carry full of family elements.
In this film, due to a fire accident, Shuyan lost her father from an early age, and she blamed this on her mother, so she had a long cold war with her mother and completely lost the warmth of the family. Later, through the hands of Yingshu, the history was changed, and the long-lost father's love was regained, and the joy of the reunion of father and daughter also infected the audience in front of the screen.
Then the completely blackened Young-sook kills her father 21 years ago, so that Shuyan in 2020 watches her father disappear from the front, and these changes are presented in a CG picture, which makes the viewer's heart like a knife.
After experiencing these things, Shuyan also forgave her mother and regained her love for her mother, and these family scenes are all touching places in the movie.
Of course, the biggest selling point of the movie is the plot that has been reversed many times.
Although previous films such as "Back to the Future", "Butterfly Effect", "Black Hole Frequency" and other films are also like this routine, the plot reversal like the gradual blackening of the female second in this film is still very surprising, who would have thought that a weak girl who has been abused by her adoptive mother for a long time will become a murderous demon king?
Three
The drama of Jeon Jong-sui and Park Shin-hye, two post-90s actresses, is the most exciting part of the movie.
Born in 1994, Quan Zhongrui debuted at the peak, and in 2018, she became the heroine of Li Cangdong's high-scoring masterpiece "Burning". The film won the competition unit award of the 71st Cannes Film Festival Febisi Award, which also made Quan Zhongrui's acting skills attract worldwide attention.
In this film, Young-sook, played by Jeon Jong-sui, is a girl with a complicated background, her origin is not too much to explain, the audience only knows that her parents are dead, and her adoptive mother treats her as a demon.
Combined with the later plot, we can also guess that the death of Yingshu's parents is most likely related to her murderous nature, and her adoptive mother will make those crazy moves.
At the beginning of the film, Young-sook needs to hide her crazy nature and often exposes hysteria, which is very considerate of the actor's acting skills.
Quan Zhong Rui can show the crazy, violent, calm and anti-social characteristics of the character, and his acting skills are very mature, enough to hang most of our small fresh meat stars in the mainland.
Compared with Jeon Jong-seo, Park Shin-hye's character Shu-yeon is much simpler, but it is not easy to grasp.
Pigo's impression of Park Shin-hye is still in June's "#活着", in which she co-played a man and woman who struggled to survive when the zombie apocalypse came. That movie Pigo has also introduced, its story is relatively simple, and it cannot be seen that Park Shin-hye's interpretation level.
In this film, the Shuyan she plays has a lot of inner drama, which is where the performance is difficult.
Pi Ge's most memorable scene is the scene where Shu Yeon waits to answer the phone, if the phone rings, it proves that Young-sook did not die in 1999, and if it doesn't ring, it proves that she got rid of Young-sook's control.
Park Shin-hye's performance presents the complex psychological changes that Shu-yeon has in the face of life and death in the body movements of the face and the whole body, and there is no dialogue but it firmly affects the audience's heart, and her acting skills are not inferior to That of Jeon Jong-sui.
There are not many characters in the movie "Telephone", and the story is also a line to the end, which is completely the personal performance of the two actresses, Jeon Jong-seok and Park Shin-hye, who also delivered satisfactory answers with their own interpretation quality.
Although the plot has a lot of references to the previous cross-over movies, there are still many novelties in the story.
In the 112-minute story, although the pace is not tight or slow, all kinds of suspenseful plots always touch the hearts of the audience.
Young director Li Congxian not only has superiority in creating plots, but also the strength of his director cannot be underestimated, and his debut can get high scores, and Pigo feels that his future is unlimited.
Text/Pippi Film Editorial Department: Bloody Dan Heart
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