Movie Title: Moui / Moui: The Legend of a Portrait
Director: Tae-Kyeong Kim
Date Released: July 26th, 2007
Date Seen: January 6th, 2014
Language/Country of Origin: Korean / South Korea
Part 1 – Spoiler Free Quickie Review
A predictable and yet still surprising ghost story from Korea. The movie follows Yun-hui, who is travels to Vietnam to visit an old friend, and learn about Muoi’s curse. She intends to use the information to write her next book. The first half is a pretty creepy ghost story, while the second half gets overly predictable with a rushed ending.
This movie would have been perfect as a short story – with simply learning what happened to Muoi. It’s told in a nice way, with little snippets of information from various people, and eventually going to the house where a horrible thing happened to a girl, Muoi, 100 years ago. It’s told in a way that we see characters telling parts of the legend, like “It happened in this house, first ….. ” and then it will switch over to being the story visually. It’s not distracting at all and helps give it a nice “ghost story” feel. The director was very good at cutting back to the story characters at the right time, or going back to the ghost story at the right time. It felt like you were in a campfire listening to this and you were seeing the imagined version of it played out in front of you. I loved that.
It’s very predictable what is going on – but there was still a bit of a surprise at the end. It’s not really a twist, it’s just you find out you don’t have all the information, which changes the story slightly. It was fairly predictable, and once you find out this new bit of information, it’s still predictable. Despite the predictability, I still enjoyed the movie and it kept my attention. It was mostly due to this creepy atmosphere the whole movie had going on. The first half went at a nice pace, but the second half felt rushed and disheveled. They tried to wrap it all up in a revenge-colored present, that didn’t work out too well.
A few parts are mildly confusing – but I think it’s just because of translation issues. There’s a little bit of confusion on what Muoi’s curse actually is and does. Does it kill someone, does the ghost kill someone, does the ghost serve someone, is it even a ghost? By the end it’s clear what it does, but at the beginning of the movie, they never explicitly say what the curse DOES and so it can cause a bit of confusion. Just take it as you’re discovering the story of a vengeful ghost, instead of a “curse” and it will make more sense.
If you like very atmospheric ghost stories – this might be your thing.
Part 2 – In Depth Spoiler Ridden Review/Synopsis
The movie begins with a woman seeing strange things – like a shadow passing behind her, or a scary face in a mirror, all things that she can’t really be sure she just saw. Finally she stops in front of a mirror, and a strange mist kind of thing comes up from the ground, the woman turns, screams, and that’s the last we see of her.
Now we go to a video recording of a reporter asking women if they know Muoi’s curse. They say different things – that her curse is for betrayed lovers, or betrayed friends, that her curse is for someone getting revenge, and that she has two faces – a “bewitching” face to get people and then a “scary” face for the revenge, and a couple of people (the older generation as opposed to the 20 somethings answering the questions) refuse to answer, or seem really upset by the question.
The woman watching this is Yun-hui, a writer. We see her talking to a couple of friends about how she is going to Vietnam to talk to Seo-yeon about Muoi’s curse for her next book. Apparently, Yun-hui is a writer and in her last book wrote some not so great things about Seo-yeon (she’s a slut, etc.), and Yun-hui’S friend, Seongeun, is hoping that Seo-yeon hasn’t read Yun-hui’s book. Seongeun is being pretty bitchy, and apparently is now dating Jihoon, one of the guys that Seo-yeon slept with. She takes a picture of them two together and wants Yun-hui to show it to Seo-yeon. Jihoon doesn’t say anything but has a look on his face that looks like he thinks this is a bad idea.
January 10th
Yun-hui leaves for Vietnam to see Seo-yeon. Right before she leaves we hear a call from her editor who demands she get the story or else she’ll “cough up every penny”. So apparently, she really needs this story or else will be in big trouble.
Yun-hui gets off the plane, and at first doesn’t see Seo-yeon. A woman approaches, tall, well dressed in all black, black hair, and gorgeous. It’s a very striking entrance. Yun-hui doesn’t recognize Seo-yeon, and says it’s been so long since she’s seen her that she hardly recognizes her. Seo-yeon thinks Yun-hui is being silly, and says she’s hardly changed. They hug. Yun-hui seems very weird about the situation, probably because she’s worried Seo-yeon read her last book. In the car, Seo-yeon tells Yun-hui she should learn up on Vietnamese history before writing her story, but Yun-hui says she wants to get right to the actual legend of Muoi, since she’s on a tight schedule. So Seo-yeon takes her to some place with pictures on a wall outside. Seo-yeon shows one picture, of a family. The little girl’s name, Muoi means 10 in Vietnamese, or 10th child. Muoi was born a normal little girl. We don’t learn many other details, other than that the villagers thought her ghost haunted their town. So, some monks sealed her spirit in a portrait. The seal eventually came undone and so began the curse. Supposedly the curse is cast on the 15th with the full moon and lasts for 15 days. Seo-yeon says she’s not sure what the curse does though. In 100 years of the curse, no one has seen any victims of the curse – Seo-yeon says if the legend is true then no one can survive the curse and that Yun-hui needs to figure out how the seal on the portrait was broken, that’s her job.
That part was mildly confusing and I think it’s something that got lost in translation – because she says she has no idea what the curse “does” and yet they know people die from it. So there must be some word that didn’t translate right.
Seo-yeon says she knows a lot about the curse because she translated some stuff on Muoi for “Professor Kim”. But, there’s no way that Yun-hui can get in contact with this man, because he’s back in Korea and Seo-yeon doesn’t know his phone number. Hmmm…. Seo-yeon then switches gear and asks how the “others” are doing, probably in reference to Jihoon and Seongeun. Yun-hui does the same kind of awkward “um, I don’t know I lost touch with them” and changes the subject saying it’s late and they should go to bed.
In the hotel, Seo-yeon is already in bed, but Yun-hui plays around sticking her feet in the bath. Randomly, the shower turns on. She turns it off. She goes to get in bed, and the doorbell starts ringing, so she gets up, and again, the shower turns on. Yun-hui pulls back a window curtain and there is a woman with like a black painted face. Yun-hui screams and tries to wake up Seo-yeon, but the body in the bed is also a black face woman. Then as Yun-hui runs towards the door, and in walks Seo-yeon…. she says she went to the front desk to try and get another room, but this is the only one available, and apparently it’s haunted. But oh well, they can share a bed. Yun-hui starts to tell Seo-yeon what happened, but refrains.
January 11th
The next day, they go to Seo-yeon’s house. It’s a gorgeous large house, dark and mysterious just like Seo-yeon. Yun-hui is immediately drawn to a staircase – Seo-yeon says that’s her “secret place” where she likes to paint. She tells Yun-hui not to go up there. She shows Yun-hui to her room, up another staircase on the other side of the house, it’s a pretty nice room. Seo-yeon’s room is downstairs. Now the girls go to “get to work.” They go on a boat ride in a beautiful river, with Yun-hui taking pictures of the surroundings and Seo-yeon. Seo-yeon starts reminiscing about when they were in school, and how she depended on Yun-hui so much then, and she wished they could always be together. Yun-hui clearly isn’t super comfortable with these memories so Seo-yeon switches gears and starts talking about Muoi again. Villagers kept their distance from Muoi, just because of her social status (low). She fell in love with an artist named Nuen. The camera now switches to us looking at Muoi and Nuen falling in love, in a pretty village, where everyone is wearing white. We see Nuen putting a ring on it, because he likes it (to quote Beyonce). But apparently, Nuen was just in town for a little bit – and had a fiance. He didn’t finish his portrait of Muoi, and Muoi didn’t keep it, because of the fiance. The fiance was a rich woman who got pissed and started spreading horrible rumors about Muoi – who was “bewitching men with her pretty face”. Yun-hui stops Seo-yeon and asks if the fiance kill Muoi. They are coming up over a hill now, and Seo-yeon stops and points to a house, saying that the fiance did worse – in that house over the hill. We flash back again and see what happens to Muoi. A bunch of men come in and grab Muoi, and break her legs. Then the fiance walks in and starts threatening Muoi with some acid. She flips out when she notices the ring on Muoi’s finger, and can’t get it off Muoi’s hand so she pours the entire jar of acid in Muoi’s face. We don’t see the result, but we hear her screams of pain. The whole scene was pretty intense and scary. Nuen thought Muoi left him and thus went back to his fiance. Muoi couldn’t face him with her now “bloody face” (that’s how it translated) and thus decided to enact revenge. On January 15th, she hung herself, becoming a “vengeful ghost set on revenge.” Seo-yeon finishes the story with “Do you even know how much she wanted revenge?” The entire time we’ve been seeing Seo-yeon tell this story to Yun-hui in the cabin, with it kind of happening in front of them. It was really nicely done, not distracting at all and really made it feel like a ghost story being told.
Seo-yeon leaves Yun-hui to look around, while she waits outside. Yun-hui takes pictures and even finds a kind of painting of Muoi, which she takes a picture of. Back at the house, Seo-yeon gives Yun-hui all the information she has on the Muoi legend, and then says she’s going to paint. We see her sketching in her painting room on a large, about person sized canvas, while Yun-hui is in her room going through the files. Nothing too eventful happens, other than a little bit of wallpaper peeling in Yun-hui’s room, and she just sticks it back up.
January 12th
Yun-hui and Seo-yeon go to where Professor Kim worked – because she wants any information that he left there. Seo-yeon is still trying to keep Yun-hui from going there, now saying that the desk lady, Biet, is half-Korean half-Vietnamese, and thus got a lot of hate in Korean, and now doesn’t really care for them, so this lady might not take kindly to Yun-hui. They meet Biet, and yeah, she doesn’t look to happy to see them. Yun-hui fakes stomach pains and gets the set of keys from Biet o go to the bathroom (guess it’s some big public building and thus locked). Taking the keys, she goes to the room that Seo-yeon said there might be some stuff. Seo-yeon and Biet look at each other, weirdly, but don’t say anything. In the room, Yun-hui finds a blue book, that says “Muoi” on the cover and takes that, after looking around at some other pictures and such. Some wind chimes jingle while she’s in the room, despite no windows being open.
The girls leave, and go shopping. While Seo-yeon is getting fitted for a new outfit, Yun-hui is reading from the book. She starts telling Seo-yeon how the seal on the portrait was lifted. It was toward the end of WWII. Japanese soldiers raided the temple where the portrait was kept. A general found himself in a locked basement in the temple, where the monks were all praying. Shocker, guess what he found there? A monk was guarding one portrait of a beautiful woman, Muoi. The monk wouldn’t move, so the general killed him, and pulled a pin out of the portrait. Apparently “something” happened to the general, but no one knows what. So now Muoi’s portrait is still in Vietnam (in fact, I’m guessing it’s what was in the house where she got all acid-face attacked), waiting to enact its revenge. The curse allows you to ask Muoi to seek revenge for you – and she takes it on like it’s her own revenge. Seo-yeon asks how you stop the curse, and Yun-hui says she still doesn’t know that. But there is one thing you must give Muoi in return. A human body – because that’s what a ghost needs to do its job. Seo-yeon says something like “huh, ok. So there’s a copy of her portrait, want to go see it?” Again, convenient subject change. If you’re reading this and by now don’t know what’s going on, then maybe obvious asian horror isn’t your thing. I was 99% sure I knew what was going on, and then that line happened and I was like “um yep.”
They go to this guy who is a master copier. If he sees something, he can recreate it. We see in his shop some famous works, and yep, they look like dead copies. The man asks if they are looking for something in particular, and when they mention Muoi, he refuses to let them see it. Seo-yeon goes and whispers something in the mans ear, and suddenly he agrees. Seo-yeon tells Yun-hui that the man started to get scared and haunted, feeling her spirit, when he was painting the portrait. Yun-hui asks how Seo-yeon convinced the man to let them see it. She told the man that Yun-hui had been cursed, and that’s how. He takes them up to a room with everything covered in sheets. He slowly uncovers on sheet, revealing the painting. The eyes are covered, because the man says he could feel the spirit trying to take over him through the eyes. Yun-hui says that this is BS, because she’s seen that painting before. At the house where Muoi was attacked. She has a picture of it – and starts going through her camera, and where the picture should be is all black. She keeps clicking through her pictures and ends up getting to the picture of Jihoon and Seonguen. Seo-yeon is pissed and storms out. Yun-hui says she knew that Seo-yeon still had feelings for Jihoon, and that’s why she didn’t want to show her the picture – and why she lied and said she had lost touch with them. Seo-yeon says that she’s not mad about that, she’s actually worried – she knows there’s no portrait in the house – so then Yun-hui must have seen Muoi’s ghost – and is now cursed and will die, just like Muoi….. then starts laughing like it’s a joke, and so Yun-hui is like “you bitch you scared me!” and laughs it off as well. Then the girls decide to go have some fun at a club.
They meet up with a couple of Seo-yeon’s friends, and start drinking. A foreign guy hits on Seo-yeon, and Yun-hui just kind of watches and drinks into sadness, saying that Seo-yeon was acting like a tramp. She leaves, and Seo-yeon follows her out. Yun-hui says that Seo-yeon just confirmed those rumors about herself. Seo-yeon asks what rumors, and Yun-hui says “whatever I’m tired lets go home” and storms off, leaving Seo-yeon to make a bitch face at nothing. That night, more wallpaper peels while Yun-hui sleeps. She wakes up, because you know how loud wallpaper can be sometimes, and sits up to see the door to her room slowly opening, and then a scary shadow running across her room and outside. Like any intelligent person, Yun-hui follows it outside, to some kind of farm thing, storm drain, something. I don’t know outside things. There she sees a little girl, and Yun-hui says “Seo-yeon?”, the little girl puts her head in her knees, and Yun-hui goes to touch her, and the face comes up, now with acid burns all on it. She screams, and then wakes up – it appears to have been a dream. Seo-yeon tells Yun-hui that she passed out, must have been from too much booze. Yun-hui then realizes that she’s tied up – and Seo-yeon starts yelling about how could Yun-hui lie about her in her book, and what did she say about her, and she’s not a slut and blah blah blah – and then gets some acid, walks towards Yun-hui… and pours. Again, Yun-hui wakes up. Apparently we were in a dream in a dream situation. This time she’s really awake, and is crying from her scary dreams.
January 13th
Once she’s up she finds Seo-yeon making breakfast downstairs in a beautiful outdoor kitchen. No joke, I’m jealous of how pretty it was. Seo-yeon asks how the book is coming and Yun-hui says she needs more information. That right now, the motives for revenge are too “weak”. She needs something more cruel and provocative. Clearly, Seo-yeon doesn’t like this and asks what would be cruel and provocative – isn’t what happened to Muoi pretty bad already? To be torn from the one you love and then tortured so badly? Seo-yeon tells Yun-hui to put herself in Muoi’s position and think about how that would all feel. Yun-hui says she’s writing about something that happened over 100 years ago, and her readers will want something more. That sends Seo-yeon into a little fit (while still chopping up veggies for breakfast) asking “what, was Muoi not ever human to begin with? You are the reason she left the curse. People like you.”
Now we leave that scene and go to a bit later in the day with Yun-hui printing out the picture from her camera of the painted copy of Muoi’s portrait. While this is happening, wallpaper starts peeling again. Of course. Yun-hui goes to a city square and starts asking people if they know about Muoi – but remember, she doesn’t speak Vietnamese, so I’m not sure how she’s expecting to get their info if she does find anyone. One woman grabs her and starts yelling “Don’t find Muoi! She’s dangerous!” but in Vietnamese, so Yun-hui doesn’t understand her. Yun-hui pulls away from the woman, and runs off, only to realize that this same woman appeared in the video tape she watched at the beginning of the movie, about Muoi. By the time she tuns around, the woman is gone.
Still avoiding the house, because Seo-yeon is mad at Yun-hui for the comments at breakfast, Yun-hui goes to the only other person she knows, which is Biet, at the college. Yun-hui helps her with some stuff, and really just kind of annoys her until Biet asks what can she do to make Yun-hui leave. Yun-hui asks about Muoi, and Biet is like “oh god she got you on this too?” We find out that Professor Kim got into the Muoi studies BECAUSE of Seo-yeon, not the other way around. Apparently, Seo-yeon was so obsessed with it she started losing her hair, which is how Professor Kim got into it – asking Seo-yeon what was wrong, it was those studies, so he got into it. Biet says after that Seo-yeon changed. She was happier and her hair grew back. The woman now offers to take Yun-hui to Professor Kims place, another day. Yun-hui goes back to Seo-yeon’s house. There, she sees the two Vietnamese girls are there too. Yun-hui sees Seo-yeon sitting behind a flowly curtain and asks what they are doing there. The girl on the bench, seemingly not Seo-yeon, starts humming, and we see her feet outside of the curtain. Yun-hui realizes something isn’t right, pulls back the curtain, the feet are gone, and we are looking at the back of a girls head. Yun-hui reaches forward, but before she touches the girl, Seo-yeon is behind her, asking “isn’t it pretty?!” and we look down, and see a gorgeous blue dress. It’s the dress that she got Yun-hui for “the party tonight”. They get ready and all made up and pretty, with Yun-hui looking miserable the whole time. It’s not really a party, more of just a girls night, but of course they’re all talking in Vietnamese and so Yun-hui has no idea what is going on.
Yun-hui randomly starts asking Seo-yeon some nerdy question about Vietnamse history, and Seo-yeon says that despite a makeup and a dress, Yun-hui is still the same person. Yun-hui responds with “and you’re not? I heard you’d been sick. All better now?” Seo-yeon makes an odd “oh you think you know but you don’t…” face, and the other two girls at the table look concerned, but very convenient timing, it starts to rain, ending the conversation as they move inside. Of course, Seo-yeon goes in very slowly and mildly creepily. We see Yun-hui in her room, drying off, and the lights start to flicker. Behind her we see the shadow of a woman – but she doesn’t notice it. As the lights totally go off, Yun-hui goes exploring. Of course she doesn’t call out for any of the other three people that should still be in the house, she just walks around like a smart person. As she turns a corner, there are the two friends. They say something that Yun-hui understands, and she asks if they speak Korean, and they say that no – she just spoke Vietnamese, and then Yun-hui looks to a mirror and sees herself as Muoi. She looks up and the two girls now have scary grudge-child face…. then suddenly Yun-hui wakes up. Girl needs to get it together with all this Inception stuff. She was working on her book and fell asleep. She decides to go exploring again anyway, and sees some weird misty smoke kind of stuff coming from Seo-yeon’s room. She opens the door and Seo-yeon is asleep, but there are muddy footprints on the ground below her bed. Yun-hui lifts up the sheets and looks at her feet, and they are clean. She looks back, and the footprints are gone. Odd.
January 14th
Biet takes Yun-hui to Professor Kim’s old place. On the way there, Biet says that Seo-yeon had found a “victim” of the curse. Biet thinks that Se0-yeon paid the “victim” as a way to convince Professor Kim that the curse was real. Yun-hui asks if it’s true that Professor Kim is back in Korea. Biet says no, he’s just out exploring, or on a dig, like usual, but he has been gone longer than usual this time. She has the keys, but makes Yun-hui pay her for them. She gives Yun-hui an hour to look around Professor Kim’s apartment. In the apartment, she finds a DVD recording of the “victim”. She is describing almost exactly what is happening to Yun-hui. The girl on the tape says she sometimes sees shadows, or a girl who is humming the same song, or looking in the mirror and seeing Muoi. The girl asks Professor Kim if she is going to die. Yun-hui then starts to have a “oh shit” face, and starts thinking about all these things, that have happened to her as well. We next cut to Yun-hui back at Seo-yeon’s house. Yun-hui is frantically yelling for Seo-yeon and runs up into the painting room. There she finds all these kind of weird dark paintings, and a door behind everything. Inside of that door is another room – with a life size painting that kind of looks like Muoi, but a new version of the painting. Next to the painting is a copy of Yun-hui’s book, clearly well read and with passages underlined. Yun-hui gets the oh shit face again. About that time Seo-yeon appears behind Yun-hui, saying that when she read the book, she wasn’t even sure Yun-hui was talking about her (Seo-yeon) because it was so full of lies. Yun-hui asks if that’s why Seo-yeon agreed to help Yun-hui with the book. She was using it as an opportunity to get Yun-hui there so that she (Seo-yeon) could curse her (Yun-hui). Seo-yeon chuckles and says “If you do something wrong, you either pay or seek forgiveness.” Yun-hui says that whatever Seo-yeon is trying to do, or whatever she wants, it won’t work and she won’t get it. Seo-yeon laughs again creepily, saying “I just want your safe return to Korea.” As she says this, she moves to stand right next to the painting she did of Muoi and asks “Don’t you think we look alike?”
Yun-hui goes to her room and starts to pack. Seo-yeon comes upstairs and says she wants to talk about the “old days”, like when they were in school together. Seo-yeon starts reminiscing about those days, but Yun-hui just wants to know why Seo-yeon lied about everything, with Professor Kim, the tapes, etc. Seo-yeon then starts talking about the “incident” with Jihoon. Seo-yeon says that Jihoon asked her to meet him somewhere. She was so excited – now we cut to this incident happening. Three guys jump her and start to attack her, threatening rape. Jihoon walks up and she runs over to him, and he jokes that the guys “can’t handle such a little girl”. In walks Seonguen with a video camera, handing it to Jihoon who pushes Seo-yeon away and tells the boys to finish what they started. The guys rape her while Seonguen and Jihoon record the incident laughing about it. Seo-yeon says that’s why she left Korea, because she couldn’t handle feeling like everyone she knew had seen that tape. Yun-hui says she’s so sorry, that she had no idea. The book was only written based on rumors, and that’s her fault. Seo-yeon says it’s ok now, she’s changed and become a stronger woman. Yun-hui and her seem to have a kind of patching up, and Seo-yeon tells Yun-hui that she should “go to the temple” and she’ll learn more about the curse.
January 15th
When Yun-hui wakes up that morning, something is wrong with Seo-yeon. She’s having convulsions and her eyes are all red. Yun-hui tries to help her. The next scene we see is a woman taking care of Seo-yeon in bed, while Biet and Yun-hui discuss going to the temple. Biet doesn’t know why Yun-hui would want to go to the temple, after all the things that Seo-yeon has lied about. Yun-hui says she owes it to Seo-yeon now. So Biet and Yun-hui head to the temple, with Biet now being nicer to Yun-hui, indicating they’ve become friends (over the what, 3 days?).
The temple is an old abandoned temple, very eerie, yet beautiful. Inside the remnants is a well preserved cavern, probably where the basement was. There’s a room with a lot of paintings of people, all kind of creepy faces or people. The last painting, which is where Muoi’s should be, is just a black canvas. The girls go talk to the head monk who tells them the story of how Muoi was imprisoned. After Muoi killed herself, she haunted the rich fiance woman. In fact, that scene we saw at the very beginning of the movie with a woman screaming, was the rich fiance. She and Nuen talk to the monks at the temple, and hatch a plan. Nuen calls Muoi’s spirit, asking to finish the painting, that he is so sorry all of this happened. Her spirit appears, and he works on the painting. The monks burst in, and trap her soul in the painting, while Nuen and the fiance look on. The monk says that the girls need to stop now, or else Muoi’s curse will live forever. He also says what we’ve suspected all along – the way Yun-hui is describing Seo-yeon indicates that Seo-yeon is in fact Muoi. Yun-hui needs to stick this pin (looks like a big hair pin/chopstick thing) into Seo-yeon’s heart. At first Biet doesn’t tell Yun-hui this, and waits until she drops her off. Yun-hui isn’t sure what to do – kill Seo-yeon, or risk the curse being real (which would suggest that Yun-hui would die a death similar to Muoi’s). Biet says there is no curse and so Yun-hui should just go back to Korea. Biet rides off on her motorcycle with the pin, but a possessed lady causes Biet to crash and die. Yun-hui sees this all happen leading her to believe that the curse might be real and there’s more sinister things going on.
Back at the house, Yun-hui starts looking for Seo-yeon. In her own room, the wall paper starts peeling again. She sees it, and this time rips it down. Behind is a hidden panel, which she opens, and a long dead Professor Kim falls out. In his pocket is a picture of the Japanese general, standing in front of the house – the house that Seo-yeon now owns and they are in at this very moment. On the back is a handwritten note saying “Death begins the curse”. A strange noise comes from the hole that P. Kim just fell out of, and it appears to be an actual passageway, so Yun-hui starts exploring it.
In the passageway, there’s creepy things galore, like bugs and spiderwebs. Yun-hui finds a tape recording, with professor Kim’s voice. He says that “the old woman was right. Whomever awakens Muoi can’t avoid death. The portrait is kept where the Japanese general lived” (again that’s this house). Kim says he has to stop the curse, but doesn’t really know how to do it. He says the chant to call Muoi’s spirit. Yun-hui keeps walking while the tape is reciting the chant. In the end of the tunnel, Yun-hui finds Muoi’s portrait. She notices the ring that the painting is wearing is the ring that Seo-yeon gave Yun-hui. The painting comes to life as a hanged, burned Muoi. Yun-hui starts trying to walk away but with each step her shoes get more and more stuck to the ground due to some sticky substance every where. Before Muoi gets to Yun-hui, Muoi disappears, and Seo-yeon appears in front of Yun-hui, in Muoi’s dress, and below the noose – indicating, that yeah, she is kind of Muoi. Seo-yeon says one of them ahs to die, either Seo-yeon or Yun-hui. She wants Yun-hui to stab her with the pin, and even puts it up to her own chest. Yun-hui hesitates for a while, and says that she can’t. Seo-yeon says if Yun-hui doesn’t stab her, then both girls will die. Yun-hui is still debating whether or not to stab her, and is scared too. Seo-yeon keeps yelling for Yun-hui to stab her, and eventually gets her to do it by making scary burned Muoi face at her. Yun-hui stabs her, and she returns to being a now bleeding Seo-yeon. Yun-hui cries saying she is so sorry, but Seo-yeon only laughs saying that now her death can begin the curse – just like the back of the picture said.
But also – remember another thing? That the person who begins the curse must pay a price – a human body for the ghost. Yun-hui is that body. Hands appear around Yun-hui’s neck and start to slowly lift her up and strangle her. As Seo-yeon dies, she says that she could never forgive Yun-hui either. Yun-hui is continued to be strangled as she looks to the side and see’s who is strangling her – Muoi of course.
Back at the temple, a monk tells the head Monk that “Muoi is back”. They walk over to the painting, which is now the recreation of Muoi done by Seo-yeon, which looks exactly like Seo-yeon as stated before. The painting is complete, and the pin is sticking out of where the paintings heart is.
A month later – February 15th
Yun-hui (now possessed or whatever by Muoi) is back in Korea. Apparently she just now shipped her camera back to Seonguen, who calls bitching about it, saying they need to hang out. Yun-hui says don’t worry, be patient, she will see her soon. Seonguen is going through the pictures on the camera, making comments about how Yun-hui is as boring as ever. Whenever Seonguen gets to where the portrait of Muoi should be in the camera roll, her electricity freaks out and her computer starts making scary noises. She moves her head closer to the computer to listen, and on the screen scary burned faces start to appear, but she doesn’t notice. She also doesn’t notice a hanged body slowly creeping up towards her. It was very paranormal activity-esque, with how creepy this thing appeared. Not obvious, very slow, and disturbing. By the time Seonguen notices the rope, it is too late, by then Muoi’s hands are slipping around Seonguen’s neck to strangle her. Jihoon is seen waiting at the place where Seo-yeon was raped. He is wondering why Yun-hui would want to meet there. An invisible force breaks Jihoon’s leg, and then messes with him for a while, thrashing him around, and eventually strangling him to death. He is left hanging as we see Yun-hui appear from the shadows and walk away. The movie ends with her burning the picture that says “death begins the curse”, putting on her ring, and smiling creepily at the camera.
Overall: 6/10
A good, creepy ghost story for the first half with a rushed ending. Genre fans will appreciate the movie.