Spider Forest

Geomi Sup (2004), South Korea

Director : Il-gon Song

Synopsis

Kang-Min, widower and producer of a transmitting TV station, wakes up in the middle of a forest at night, where he finds a small cabin where a middle-aged man and Su-Young, Kang-Min’s girlfriend, have been brutally murdered. Chasing a shadow that appears to be the author of the crime, Kan-Min is attacked and bludgeoned into unconsciousness. When Kang-Min awakes, he walks up to a nearby highway only to be brutally hit by a vehicle at high speed.

Review

Visually stunning, impeccably performed and ornamented with a significant number of symbolic and metaphoric elements, defining Spider Forest in a single cinematographic genre might be considered however a hardly solvable question. Indeed, what starts as an undeniably horror movie, slowly metamorphoses its premise into a melancholic love story with tragic contours narrated in a depressing way. The argument of the film is based on a series of puzzles outlined by the death of two characters in a forest named Spider Forest. In accordance, after waking up in the hospital having miraculously survived after brain surgery, the now amnesiac protagonist is considered to be the main suspect for the death of his girlfriend and the brutally mutilated man in the cabin. The narrative is then, from this point on, defined by the presence of flashbacks, memories, illusions and reveries from the subconscious mind of the main character. As memories trigger more repressed memories and the story explores  the obscure details of Kang-Min’s story, his childhood, the tragic events of his life, his guilt and his own painful inner conflicts, the viewer will most likely be piecing together the fragments of what is no longer a bizarre dream, but an emotional and tragic love story. 

Several elements are delicately explored, although there is a leitmotif that goes through the movie materializing the solution (quite logical, in my honest opinion) of the puzzle at the end of the film. Unfortunately, the movie appears to leave too many loose ends (that may not be considered particularly relevant to the story) and a substantial number of open questions that the viewer will have to solve. The ambiguity of Spider Forest might in this context not be particularly appealing to the viewer at the end of the film, although at the same time it allows the viewers’ perception to be taken into consideration. 

Spider Forest remains a man’s spiraling journey of searching for the truth wrapped in a surrealist atmosphere, and without a doubt a very bizarre yet unique cinematographic experience.