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Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum korean drama review
Completed
Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum
3 people found this review helpful
by Kate
Dec 28, 2019
Completed
Overall 8.5
Story 8.0
Acting/Cast 9.0
Music 7.0
Rewatch Value 7.0
Found footage horror genre is not an easy one to execute well. There are many mistakes that can be made, and this movie avoided almost all of them.

The premise of the plot is quite simple: a group of young adults goes to a haunted location to film some spooky stuff and things go wrong. To sell such a story and make it believable you need few elements.

REASON
Why these people and that specific location? Here we have Ha Joon being the "captain" of the ghost hunting team bringing a group of selected people into one of the top 7 scariest places. It's not hard to believe that a group of haunted houses and ghost enthusiasts would sign up to go to such a location, especially since money was also involved. This setting makes it easier for us to believe this story could happen. There are plenty of youtubers doing just that.

CAST
The chemistry between the characters was amazing. While some people might say that the beginning part was boring and a bit too long, I'd like to say it was necessary. We got to know what are the dynamics between different characters, their motivation and style of acting and communicating. All the characters were relatable and easy to like which made the stakes much higher. I wanted them to survive.

That said, making a horror movie believable in the style of Blair Witch Project and using actors' names for the characters works only if the actors are not well known. Here it did not make much sense. I see no reasons why the fictional characters did not get original names since it's not like the writing, nor a production team really wanted to play on that "believability" aspect like it happened with BWP.

ENDING
Why no one searched for the kids? Why no one was concerned with what was going on? Why did none of the viewers call the police as they were watching? All of those questions have been answered in a simple yet quite clever way in one of the last scenes in the tent. Since they used a "live broadcast" as a way to showcase the found footage trope, I was afraid it would be hard to give it a reasonable ending, yet the writer and director made it work.

Overall, it was a nice horror movie. There were quite a few moments that made me scared. It wasn't heavy on cheap jump-scares, but instead they created a nice atmosphere and did a good job of playing with the different lights and shadows to make a viewer question if they saw something or not. While some scenes at the ending were unnecessary for me, and cheapened the movie a bit, I still believe it was a watch worth my time.
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