At some time in the past a young man made a mannekin that looked like the woman he loved. The woman is driven to suicide & he was blamed for it, killed by vigilantes, his corpse burned in the woods. And the manniken, which loved him, haunted his grave.

So begins Korean horror film The Doll Master (Inhyeongsa, 2004), from first-time director Yong-ki Jeong. In the modern day, a woodland doll museum has been established in that isolated place.

The curator Mr. Choi (Chun Ho-jin) invites two young men & three young women for a special opening. They are all students & artists under the impression they're to be used as models for the dolls.

One of the women, Yeong-ha (Ji-young Ok), is pale & strange with a weird little doll she calls Damien & treats like her baby. She of course goes off her nut when someone destroys the doll, but she's to some extent just the "McGuffin" in the tale, as Hitchock called the character who by misdirection most seems likely to be the culprit.

With the introduction of the students the film could very easily have descended into a "pick off the young adults one by one" cliche, with nothing added beyond the doll museum instead of the cabin in the woods.

It does descend to that to some extent, but at least there are many more decorative elements added, not least being the watchful dolls in the museum.

The curator is the so-called doll master, & he has an old man chained in a secret room in the basement just for added peculiarity. But it is wheelchair-bound Mrs. Im (Kim Bo-young) who is the dollmaker, & much more than that.

Then there's Mina (Eun-kyeong Lim), a doll-like little girl who wanders around the premises alwyas dressed in red, & may in fact be the soul of a discarded doll manifest in the world. And handsome Tae-seong (Hyeong-tak Shim) who noses around detective-style, the only member of the group not explicitly invited & could be the monkey in the works.

As the slim "mystery" unfolds, it will turn out all the students are descended from the people who killed & burned the mannekin's lover in a previous generation.

That's a better excuse than most such films require to justify a few gore FX. It's only too bad the students are mostly dullards who make for uninvolving talking heads in between victimizations.

Most Korean horror seem to draw their primary influences from Japanese filmmakers with wet longhaired ghost-girls, but this one's supernatural elements are not just the same old thing, & the rest draws its inspiration from American slashers.

All it's plot twists are obvious & it could've been a whole lot better film if it weren't all easily seen coming from a mile away. But it's better by a long shot than the usual slasher.

Continue to more dolls from Asia:
Marronnier (2004) & Malice@Dolls (1999)

copyright © by Paghat the Ratgirl