Spellbound (aka Chilling Romance) (2011)

A/N: For future reference, I'll say this here so I only have to say it once.  For this segment movies and dramas are interchangeable.  In other words, I will either review a movie or a drama, depending on which one I want to do.  All right, on with the show.

Ma Jo Goo is a street magician that became famous after designing a horror-themed magic show around a strange girl, Yeo Ri, he discovered during a show one night.  She always wore black, never smiled, and made sure to always distance herself from everyone.  After hiring the girl to work in his magic show, Jo Goo tries to draw her out and find out why she's so reclusive by inviting her to go out with the crew for drinks, but she always declines.  One night, when he is finally able to get her to go have drinks with everyone, she gets completely hammered and ends up spilling her secrets to Jo Goo and everyone else at the table.  Yeo Ri's biggest secret?  She can see dead people.  Upon this confession, everyone else is scared away, thinking she must have something wrong in the head, but Jo Goo is fascinated by her and becomes all the more interested in her life.

Okay, it's not quite that simple, but we'll get there when we get there.  First, the cast:

• Son Ye Jin as Kang Yeo Ri
• Lee Min Ki as Ma Jo Goo

Now obviously there are more than just two actors in this movie, but these are the only two that have big enough roles and distinguished enough characters to discuss, which is in a way a good thing.  There are some side characters worth mentioning, but I'll get there later.

We begin with Son Ye Jin's performance as Kang Yeo Ri, the girl that sees ghosts.  First, let me just say, Son Ye Jin is a wonderful actress.  She's very good at portraying emotion properly and convincingly, which is something that takes true talent to accomplish (on a side note, she's also very good at acting drunk).  There is a lot of emotional drama in this movie, mostly from Yeo Ri, and Ye Jin is fantastic throughout the whole of the affair.  You really get a sense of the pain she experiences from being rejected by everyone she loves and has ever known because of her...er...gift.  Also, the comedic moments are not lost on Ye Jin, though hers are few and very far between.  The other thing worth mentioning about Ye Jin's performance that I'll include here is how she acts scared.  Most actors, women in particular, when they act scared they overact.  They put way too much into it and it becomes cheesy and feels very fake or forced.  But in this film, I totally didn't get that from Ye Jin.  She acted scared in what seemed to me to be a totally realistic way.

Now to the other major player in this story, our street magician, Ma Jo Goo.  I had never heard of Lee Min Ki before I watched this, but I think, given the tone and the feel of the movie, he was the perfect choice for Jo Goo.  He's good with being on a stage (most people think all actors are good on a stage...oh, so far from the truth) and when he's doing his magic act, he plays it up just the way a real magician would.  I've seen my fair share of magic acts and I definitely see the same style and flare a real magician has to have to be successful, particularly at a horror-themed show like the one in this movie.  There are two other things that also must be mentioned, however.  The first of these is how Min Ki is at doing comedy.  For the tone of the movie, which is not meant to be straight up laugh-out-loud comedy, he did a good job.  He played well off of the other characters, he had good comedic timing, and the jokes were not overacted.  The second thing I have to mention is the romance.  This is a rather heartwarming story, comedy aside.  Min Ki did a wonderful job at making the romance subtle and portraying the emotion appropriately.

The only other characters that really do anything at all are: Jo Goo's stage manager of sorts, who has a name, but it's never really said and thus I never picked up on it (I had to look it up on the cast list; his name is Pil Dong); and Yeo Ri's friends Min Jung and Yoo Jin.  Pil Dong mostly comes across as the character that Jo Goo talks to instead of talking to himself.  He doesn't do much, and he only has a few scenes.  Yeo Ri's friends, though, have a bigger role. They explain things to her about romance (romantic comedies, to be precise) that she doesn't know or really have a reason to know.  They don't actually help the situation generally, but they do have a little bit of a character arc in the movie, which allows you to sort of connect a little bit to them regardless of how little you see them.

Now for the section I'm not looking forward to doing.  The writing.  Oh, dear, this movie.  Let me just clarify for everyone out there: I love this movie.  It's funny, cute, and has a touching romance.  BUT there are some issues I must point out in this part of the review that I don't like talking about.  The first and most major of these issues is the pacing.  For the first two-thirds of the movie, the pacing is wonderful.  It's slow enough to seem somewhat realistic, yet fast enough to keep you interested.  But somewhere around the beginning of the final third the pacing goes haywire.  It gets choppy and it feels almost like they realized two-thirds of the way through the movie that they had a time limit and they had to really rush the last third of the story.  This is really a shame because the last third is where it gets really interesting.  Not that it's not interesting before that, but the last third has the plot twist in it, as well as the relationship resolution that wasn't handled all that well in this case.

Another problem with the final third of this movie is the tone.  I said before that the pacing gets choppy, and that also applies here.  It's almost like it can't decide what kind of ending it wants to be.  It can't decide whether it wants to be a happy silly ending or a serious heartwarming ending.  Had they not tried to rush the final third so much and actually picked a tone to stick with, I really think this ending would've been much better without changing much of anything.

And the last issue I have with this movie, particularly the final third, is a small one, but important to me.  That is, the girlfriend.  I haven't mentioned Jo Goo's girlfriend up to this point because she's hardly in this movie and she doesn't do anything accept to be the reason why Jo Goo stops seeing Yeo Ri for a brief (and I do mean brief) period of time.  I don't have a problem with the token girlfriend concept.  I DO, however, have a problem with the way she reacts at a certain point in the movie.  It's right around the point where the plot starts to feel rushed and choppy; in fact, it's right at the beginning of the final third of the movie.  The situation is this: she comes home from a trip to France to find Jo Goo and Yeo Ri asleep together in the living room (you'll understand if you watch the movie).  Not only does she not freak out that her boyfriend is with another woman, but later when she figures out that Jo Goo is in love with Yeo Ri, she completely steps out without a fight, without so much as a cross word to her ex.  THAT is completely unrealistic to me.  That, and also it feels kind of like they didn't know what else to do with the girlfriend so they swept her under the rug, so to speak.

Now for the obligatory warning section.  Not much to say this time around.  The only thing I might warn people of is there are a few jump scares in this movie and there are a few scenes in which I really didn't want to look at the screen (I'm a wimp when it comes to scary movies).  Most of the scare factor comes out of shock value, however.  A lot of it is just the surprise and creepiness of how the ghosts look when you see them for the first time (the music doesn't help either; it just makes it freakier).  Lastly, there is a sex scene in this movie, but I don't actually know if it counts because they show NOTHING.  Absolutely NOTHING.  This intrigues me, because typically Korean movies have at least one sex scene where they show stuff, of course depending on the movie.

Otherwise, this movie has a rather heavy focus on what it's like to be alone in everything and exploring what that means.  This story does a good job of showing how people can't function to the fullest extent entirely on their own, and the writers did a decent job of showing how painful it is for someone to be completely cut off from everyone.

All right, final comments.  As I said before, I love this movie.  It's pretty well done in places, and for all its flaws, it was a fun watch.  It's not really a horror movie so much as it is a romantic comedy with horror elements to it.  It's kind of a horror-that's-not-a-horror movie.  So I'd say if you're looking for a movie that's scary without being scary, watch this movie.  Just go into it with an open mind and see what you think.