[K-Movie Night] Spellbound
by Dramaddictally
Welcome to K-Movie Night — a once-a-month feature where we microwave some popcorn, put on a face mask, and get cozy with a Korean movie from yesteryear. With so many films finally streaming (with subs!), now is the time to get caught up on all those movies we missed featuring our favorite drama actors.
Each month, we’ll pick a flick, write a review, and meet you back here to discuss whether or not it’s worth a watch. Super simple. All you have to do is kick up your feet and join us in the comments!
Movie Review
I’m so excited about this month’s pick! First off, Spellbound (2011) is a horror rom-com mashup that stars Lee Min-ki and Sohn Ye-jin as the leading are-they-gonna-kiss couple. And second, it’s got a drama remake coming up next month that looks amazing.
I love Lee Min-ki in dramaland and the last time he appeared in a K-Movie Night with 2013’s Very Ordinary Couple, I only had good things to say. And Sohn Ye-jin is no stranger to this series either (most recently in the lovely romance Be With You) — reason being: I can’t resist her cute face. Seeing these two together for two hours is enough to get me to bite, but with a new drama based on the film, we can’t pass up the chance to compare the two.
The drama, starting on July 18, is called Spooky in Love and it’s starring Park Eun-bin and Yang Se-jong! I mean, if anyone ever wanted my attention, that’s a way to get it. And so, even if horror and rom-com don’t turn out to be a good combo, I’m betting that the leads in both the movie and the drama will be matches made in heaven.
Spellbound has a rom-com setup – high on the comedy tone – but the thing that’s keeping this couple apart is not a normal rom-com conflict. Instead, we start with a street magician, MA JO-GU (Lee Min-ki), who’s looking for an improved act, and a woman who never smiles, KANG YEO-RI (Sohn Ye-jin), because – as it turns out – she’s haunted by ghosts.
When Jo-gu sees Yeo-ri, and her spooky and spaced-out appearance, he gets the idea for a horror magic show with audience participation. There will be a ghost, a story about a murder, and an audience member that he saves from the clutches of the ghost’s hands (not to mention some serious 2011 eyeliner on Lee Min-ki, making me miss that era so much). The punchline is that he hires Yeo-ri to play the aggressive ghost in his show. And the thing becomes a mega hit.
Now, straight out the gate, this film feels off kilter. The magic shows are captivating and deadly serious, while Jo-gu’s insistence that his new hire should go out for drinks with the team is all slapstick fun. This makes the characters, especially Yeo-ri, off balance as they skid between laughter and terror. And it also makes them hard to relate to, giving us a plot-driven and thematic movie with roots in the horror genre.
The theme here is loneliness, as we learn that Yeo-ri’s mother and sister have gone to live in Norway in order to be free from Yeo-ri’s ghosts. Her friends never come to visit and she only talks to them on the phone. And as for dating, forget it. She kissed someone in ninth grade but when the hauntings started soon after, every possible partner has been scared away.
And it makes sense because the hauntings are super scary. It’s not just the makeup and how intensely creepy the main ghost is, but also the way the ghost terrorizes anyone that tries to get close to Yeo-ri – like the date who’s trapped in an elevator as it freefalls with him and the ghost inside.
The strange thing about Yeo-ri’s sightings of dead people is that she’s not the only one who can see them. When the story begins, it feels like a riff on The Sixth Sense, where the recently dead come to Yeo-ri so that she’ll find their bodies or learn their story and then report it to the police. But anyone who comes around – including Jo-gu when he stops by her house – can see the ghosts as well, and might soon be haunted by them too.
There is one ghost, however, who’s the main event. This is Yeo-ri’s close friend from high school who died when the two were in a bus accident together. The paramedic had to attend to one of them first, he chose Yeo-ri – who lived – while the friend who was helped second did not survive. And since then, the dead friend will not rest, nor will she let Yeo-ri.
So, the blending of horror and rom-com gives us “a haunting” in two senses of the word. Yeo-ri is literally haunted by a terrifying ghost. But the loneliness it provokes gives her an inner struggle that makes it hard for her to get close to people – which is the center of the rom-com story. Once Jo-gu learns of Yeo-ri’s battle with the living dead – and is scared half to death himself – he takes a liking to her, despite his girlfriend, and starts to realize that any man who dates her cannot be a coward.
The “getting to know you” part of the romance revolves around dealing with the dead, which makes Jo-gu confront his fear as a requisite for falling in love. Yeo-ri on the other hand, reads as so lonely and deprived that it’s easy to see how she’d get attached to someone who spends so much time with her. That’s not to say that Jo-gu could be anybody, but that there’s no way she’s not going to fall for him once he sticks around.
And this, to me, amplifies the typical “single girl” story in the tradition of heroines who are scared they’ll always be alone. That idea underlies a lot of romance movies, except here, there’s a material reason for her fear (the ghosts), making it an allegory, and flipping it squarely into the horror genre. So while rom-com and horror don’t mix well if you want a cohesive or coherent story, I like the meta-analysis of what each genre entails and how the two can be stitched together.
As for the characters, I don’t care terribly much about either of them – it’s not that deep – but the leads are in fact terrific in their deadpan as they move from moments of intensity to cracking a joke. When Yeo-ri screams into the wind to appease her ghost, Jo-gu yells insults after her. It should be a serious scene, but Yeo-ri turns to ask, “What if she starts haunting you?” And Jo-gu’s face changes from a smile to fear and disbelief as he realizes it’s a real possibility – giving us a laugh-out-loud moment.
The finale is a letdown (not that I had very high hopes) with a battle that’s a spectacle to watch but ultimately goes nowhere. The entire movie becomes a setup for the line, “Love is never easy,” with the continued haunting as a manifestation of all our inner demons – those that come out to play when we try to form relationships.
With excellent leads and all the tropes of a rom-com, it’s not hard to stay with this story until the end. The horror elements actually make it more entertaining, with thoughts on how we create loneliness by pushing people away as we try protect them (or ourselves). But ultimately, it doesn’t work. It’s disjointed with rom-com filler that falls flat in the midst of a sad story and characters that are all over the place. More kooky than spooky, I’m hoping the upcoming drama will fix this by taking what works and leaving the rest for dead.
Join us in July for the next K-Movie Night and let’s make a party of it! We’ll be watching Single in Seoul (2023) and posting the review during the last week of the month.
Want to participate in the comments when it posts? You’ve got 3 weeks to watch! Rather wait for the review before you decide to stream it? We’ve got you covered.
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