FILM
REVIEW – CELLO (2005).
A rather
dull Korean ghost story that fails to make much sense. Mi-ju Hong (Hyeon-a Seong) is a music teacher with
issues. She feels guilty about surviving a car crash, which killed her best
friend on her own music school graduation day. Now one of her own students is
making threats against her, Her own daughter is not very good at her cello
practice, and seems to have a haunted cello as well.
For the
first hour of the film hardly anything happens at all, supernatural or
otherwise. The Bach music is nice, and ominous of things to come. There are a
few genuinely creepy moments, but most of the film is utterly unscary. It’s
also derivative. Some scenes are borrowed from The Omen, i.e., a role reversal
takes place of the scene where Damien watched as his mum fell to her death over
a balcony – here a child clings to a ledge while the ghostly killer watches and
assists her demise.
Mi-ju Hong emotes a lot but makes no effort to fight back as her
family are wiped out one by one. In the end she takes up a golf club and
smashes the cello with it, and wakes up in an asylum. Her family are not dead
at all. She has merely imagined the whole thing in the trauma she feels after
the car crash, which her friend may have actually survived.
The real highlight of
the film is that it allows you to match the scenes to the over-egged DVD film
study notes, where an over-enthusiastic try hard critic comments that the scene
with a golf club used as a weapon represents an ironic statement on Korean
capitalist values – no it doesn’t.
Arthur Chappell
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