A macabre fable against bullying

As the movie began, the lights went out and chilling accents of jarring, minor fiddles played through the theater room, my spine crawling as I realized I had made a horrible mistake.

I hate horror movies. I’ll never understand the appeal of this particularly macabre genre, even though I’m very pricked and amused by the gore.

My pitiful heart sank as I moaned inwardly, pressing the folds of my jacket against me and sinking deeper into the plush chairs in the theater.

Half of me cursed that I didn’t read the file properly and wanted to run away if it got too much, and tell my boss I couldn’t review a horror movie. Eyes narrowed and fingers over ears, I braced myself, trying to decipher the plot while resisting the unworthy urge to scream over the creepy bits.

I definitely took heart from the familiar cast with David Lee (Itaewon Class, Hotel Del Luna) as Do Hyun, an English student who spends the first half of the film frolicking with his very juvenile friends Byung Joon (Kim Do Hoon) and Chan. Gyu (Nam Min Woo), doing frivolous things like drinking and chasing after girls.

But events take a turn when Do Hyun’s mentor, Professor Yeo, played by famous veteran actress Seo Yi Sook (Start Up, Hotel Del Luna), introduces him to new transfer student Jin Ho (Kin Nam Woo), who is shy and nervous as hell because he is still recovering from trauma when his father died in a freak car accident.

Jin Ho tells Do Hyun about his hypnotherapy treatment by a teacher Choi (Son Byung Ho), who uses it to relieve Jin Ho’s trauma, and encourages Do Hyun to give it a try.

Everything goes to hell in a hand basket when Do Hyun undergoes hypnosis; he sees eerie images of a hanged man, an abandoned orphanage building, and a girl who appears with her head covered by a burlap sack with ropes tied around it.

The story continues

These visions continue to visit him sporadically, and they also seem to haunt only his friends around him and no one else. The visions widen to include burning moths, floating ashes, crawling maggots and broken glass, which drag them into spells of mad fear, violent rages and shaking spells, then inevitably to mutilation and destruction. dead.

As you might guess, The Hypnosis is revenge in the form of a dish served cold; in this case, served with broken glass, boiling water, and insanity-driven suicide. The burlap sack girl’s haunting was the result of bullying, and she came back to just deliver deserts.

I was half-crazed when, during an exam, Jin Ho started going into a hypnotic trance and instead of sharpening his pencil, he started shaving off bits of skin and meat from his finger instead with a penknife. Good Lord.

Another gruesome scene that made me want to get out of the movie was when Chan Gyu went into a trance in the gym and met the burlap sack girl, who quickly gouged out his eyes (with a lot of squishy sound effects) and offered them to her. .

Hypnosis is no match for your run-of-the-mill horror show (in my limited experience), and while it does feature the usual jump scares accompanied by the creepy synth music and booming bass, it’s still pretty cool. was the slow, grotesque horror of it all really mesmerized me.

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