Well Deserved Praise

Excellent, a Must See

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

The writer Baek is doing well when she gets hit with charges of plagiarism in 2005, then with writer's block. (Or was it writer's block, plagiarism, then more writer's block?) She takes her daughter to a backwoods village, and stays at what used to be a wartime orphanage. The locals say it is haunted by a ghost. The daughter, Yeung-hee, claims to see a friend, but the mother does not see that friend.There are several interludes that seem to be flashback, but are instead reverie, where the writer's concentration on imagination blocks out other events. I found these to be counter-productive; if she's writing in her head, why not do it at the typewriter or computer?Baek has Yeung-hee pinkie-swear that she won't play with her invisible inaudible friend who lives upstairs. Is that going to work?When she throws her laptop on the floor, then stomps on it until it is badly broken, I gave up on this film. Two minutes later, the stomping turns out to be another false scenario that the writer daydreams.Her husband loses a piece of career advancement over her controversy, even though they have long separated. So her support from other people is weakened.Her attempts to write do not go well. She starts pumping her young daughter for details about the stories that her invisible friend keeps repeating. The daughter says she will not, naturally enough. The friend is repetitive and boring as well.The place they are staying at is also being upgraded for other tourists to use, so the locals on are scene. One of these is the son of the 'Sheriff' who more or less runs the town. The father is well-organized, and runs other people's lives. The son is slow (mentally and physically), fat, awkward, entitled, and has little sense of personal boundaries. He's a loose cannon that just about everybody despises.During the period of the refurbishment, we first see that the daughter is imaginary. The writer has long heated discussions with her, but the workers just see a woman getting wild and animated while she's talking to herself. They figure artists just are not like regular folks.So, the writer is delusional, and the real or imagined loss of the daughter has cost her a lot. Why is she left alone? She clearly needs at least nearby professional assistance since she does not seem to be able to prosecute her own life.Watching the nonsense with locked doors and the daughter going missing, then showing up again gets very tedious. The daughter is the muse, I guess, and she tells Baek the story her friend told her. Baek goes on a binge of writing. She takes the end result to her editor who just loves it. The picture should be over. Now and forever. But it goes on.Baek's new book is published and she is quite successful again. Let the horror end. Her book races to the top of the charts and stays there for a while. She's having a relaxing bath with her daughter (hm, still crazy) when the problems hit. Apparently her 2007 book bears a strong resemblance to a book written by someone else in 1992. Great, double plagiarism.She goes home and looks for her daughter in vain. She goes to her ex husband, who of course does not have the dead daughter. A shrink confronts her with the daughter's accidental death. She has difficulty embracing it. Yeung-hee died because she dropped a running hair drier into her bath water while Baek was arguing with someone on the telephone. Guilt, squared and cubed.What to do next? The story of the dead daughter telling her the narrative of the book does not gain much acceptance. Her ex asks her the birthday, the favourite colour, the favourite food of Yeung-hee. Baek does not know. Guilt again. Her publishing house is up for sale because of the scandal.Baek does some digging to find that the person who wrote the 1992 book got the story from his dead wife. Baek decides to solve the riddle involved in that case, which should restore faith and trust in her, and remove the plagiarism scandal. (Really? You've got to be kidding.)Does the second half work, where everything is gone over a second time?Baek definitely stirs things up in the village where the orphanage resides, and real miscreants are not happy with her.Does she prevail against such long odds? She has precious little support, and the only ones with the full truths are the guilty.------Scores-------Cinematography: 8/10 Exteriors: excellent. Interiors, no so much.Sound: 10/10 Fine.Acting: 1/10 The lead actress is over the top most of the time and convincing very little of the time. The actor who plays the sheriff's son is either a fine actor (like Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man, 1988) or just the opposite, a non-actor with the character's traits. I think it's the second. The other actors are forgettable, except the fellow who played the husband.Screenplay: 4/10 Solving an old murder cleanses away the new plagiarism charges? No. Her 2007 book came directly from the 1992 book, so the central point of the movie fails. Also, the lead character is certifiably insane and should not have been conducting anything on her own, much less a murder investigation. The horrible consequences of her actions are plenty of proof.

SPOILERS, SPOILERS, SPOILERS.Here's your story: Popular writer gets accused of plagiarizing her latest novel. She retreats with her young daughter to a small town to begin resurrecting her career and working on her next book. Increasingly frustrated, and with a bad case of writer's block, she becomes obsessed with finding her literary inspiration by any means necessary…She soon finds what she's looking for, but it's way more than she bargained for.From there, this movie plays out as part ghost story, part murder mystery, part psychological drama, part action crime thriller…That's a lot of parts for one film!!!...This movie could have easily gotten by with just one or two of these story parts that are typical of this genre, and, it probably would have been a much better film if so. But, that's not the case, and this flick is what it is!Did I like it?...Well, Kinda!...but, I can't make up my mind, and have several varying opinions of what I thought of it overall:On the one hand, it does seem to be a movie that ran out of steam halfway through, and ended up haphazardly slamming 2 separate one hour stories together in order to get to the finish line…This is the simplest and most likely explanation. These 2 stories are actually intertwined well enough, but the differing tones and themes of each story just don't seem to mesh together very well overall.On the other hand, when I saw this film a second time, I couldn't help but think this story was primarily intended to be interpreted as somewhat of a 3 act play based around the life of the heroine. It's interesting to look at this film this way, but even in doing so, it's still not quite right.On the third hand (Yes, I have 3 hands…this is very useful!), this movie is not all that different than an anthology type film that tells 3 or 4 horror/mystery/thriller stories that are usually somewhat loosely woven together. The exception here being that it's the same characters continuing the same story along a differing path as the movie progresses. Hmmmm…this movie works well from this point of view, but…it's still a little bit off!Aside from the disjointed way this story unfolded, there's not too much else to complain about; Overall production was quite solid…Acting by entire cast was sufficient, and, the lead actress was quite effective throughout.So, make of this film what you will. I thought it was entertaining enough to give it a watch, but I can't wholeheartedly recommend it in all honesty, because it doesn't quite hit the mark no matter how you look at it…none of my 3 hands can give it a definite thumbs up!I think it's current IMDb rating of 6.3 is pretty much "spot on"!...I'd really like to give it a rating of 7, but I just can't bring myself to do it…so, 6 out of 10 stars for me!

Any writer can attest to the problems faced by successful novelist Baek Hee-Soo (Eom Jeong- Hwa), at one point plagued by accusations of plagiarism, and another when faced with an extreme writer's block that doesn't seem to go away no matter how hard she tries to look for inspiration. At her publisher's advise, Baek travels to a quaint town with her young daughter and puts up at an old cabin, where her daughter befriends an imaginary friend who starts to whisper stories to her. Desperate, she regurgitates the story into a new book, only to be slammed by plagiarism charges again. Talk about being unlucky the second time round.But I digress. Bestseller plays along the lines of a horror film, setting it all up in very similar terms poised to give audiences a good scare. There's a testy relationship between an obsessed mother and her cute daughter, an inexplicable elderly woman who hangs around the house, and having a young girl communicate with her invisible friend are all ingredients that are staple in horror flicks, and not to mention a group of townsfolk who seem to be hiding something behind that ultra-friendly facade toward the famous writer.Written and directed by débutant Lee Jeong-Ho, it's a curious film of two almost distinct parts. The first dwells heavily with the dilemma of Baek and her frustrations in having to come up with a novel to debunk her critics on her perceived plagiarism, and we journey into this desperation with her. Eom Jeong-Hwa brings forth a really crazed performance, with flip- flopping mood swings each time her young daughter rubs her the wrong way. You're constantly guessing whether did she or didn't see, although the outcome of this will be spelt out in the film and not left ambiguous for the audience to decide, and I was indeed quite surprised when it was done so in the middle, which means there's something else to show for in what's to follow.The second half takes on a curiouser turn, where Baek, from being the protagonist moving the story forward, becomes a mere spectator in her own tale, where she returns to the cabin to try and unearth who exactly has been feeding her daughter the story that she adopted. With the first half revealing what the twist in the story is, the latter half becomes quite pedestrian, and to say anything more would be to spoil the film in its entirety. Suffice to say it involves a lot more people than an almost one woman show in the first half, and the entire mystery somehow lacked the eerie feeling already set up earlier, and opted to go down a more conventional thriller with an obligatory revelation you could've seen a mile away.Like Baek, I suspect Lee Jeong-Ho may have lost the plot halfway, and decided to ramp up the film into a noisy crescendo with more characters, such as a burly man who on the surface seems to be good natured, and his father the town's one time sheriff who is intricate to the quick subplot added. Other subplots include the expansion of the role for Baek's estranged husband Yeong-Joon (Ryoo Seung-Yong), and a set of neat coincidences and lucky factors that allowed the film to end how it did in a big round-about fashion.I suppose when in doubt, set out to do a lot in the hopes that some aspects of the story will hit their mark. Unfortunately it boiled down to a largely promising potential that was let down by a shortage of ideas to carry it through the full feature. Instead you get two stories for the price of one, and it's a pity that both parts stood out distinct from each other and lacked the gel to pull them together, which would have been awesome.