Moss (a.k.a. Iggi), 2010.
Directed by Kang Woo-Suk.
Starring Park Hae-il, Jeong Jae-young and Yu Jun-Sang.
SYNOPSIS:
A man returns to his hometown after the mysterious death of his father and stumbles into a dark web of secrets and betrayals.
No one likes disappointing a friend. I’m sure “stop letting friends down” or “make more time for people I care about” will rank highly amongst the more realistic New Year’s resolutions made this January. Imagine my irritation then when, just days into this New Year, a film of my choosing was a source of both disappointment and bafflement as I met a friend for the last time in at least weeks, perhaps months.
There’s nothing quite like sharing fear. Love might come close, maybe, but fear is much easier to talk about afterwards and grows funnier with hindsight, whilst love’s sadness merely mellows with age. What could be better then, than a horror film send off? Where better to have it than a dark, secluded, silent spot in the wind battered countryside? What better concept for the story than a weird mix of mysterious murderers, seeking salvation from their sins in the supernatural, founding an isolated community and terrorising an outsider to protect their secrets?
I was anticipating a creepy, jumpy thrill ride through shocks and secrets of unspeakable evil. Or something to that effect. Moss is a Korean film and I was therefore expecting it to be free of any British sensibility or pretentious European limitations. I’d heard Korean horror was something to be genuinely feared and was expecting a double barrelled fright fest.
Instead I’m not quite sure what it was we got. It was certainly long. Only just less than 3 hours long, in fact. Moments in the film were clearly intended to be terrifying but I think that Moss’ marketing campaign, which places it firmly in the genre of horror, was misguided to the say the least. But then again I’m not sure what else to call it. The plot is evidently meant to be a complex web of revelations and reverses but I was left, at the end of the marathon runtime, feeling like I’d learnt nothing new. If this is a mystery there is precious little to start with and no more by the end.
The drawn out story follows Yu, who arrives in a remote community after his estranged father (also called Yu) suddenly dies. We learn through regular flashbacks that the older Yu had some sort of spiritual gift, which maverick Detective Cheon decided to harness in order to rehabilitate killers. For young Yu, arriving in an odd and small village of eccentrics, doubts continue to hang over the nature of his father’s death. Did he fall from the land of the living or was he pushed? What exactly was his father doing in the middle of nowhere with this man called Cheon, who everyone appears to worship despite an aura of danger surrounding him?
Moss meanders through themes as diverse as corruption and rape, spirituality and bureaucracy. It never succeeds as a horror because the monsters are in plain sight from the start, with most of them succeeding only at being hilariously inept. One character in particular is so bumbling that had the script tossed him a few innuendos we could have been watching “Carry On Korean Conspiracy”. The lighting undermines any potentially scary moment, even when the soundtrack is trying its hardest to initiate some jitters. The dialogue, at least when rendered as English subtitles, is expositional, dull and far from conducive to horror.
Moss fails to manage a single scare and even more importantly as the story drags endlessly on; it never makes you care either.
Liam Trim (follow me on Twitter)
Originally published January 9, 2012. Updated April 10, 2018.
