The well photographed & superficially artful Thai horror film Cello (Chello hongmijoo ilga salinsagan, 2005) incorporates, obviously enough, a soundtrack rich in cello music, which adds a great deal more to the moodiness & atmosphere & originality of this intriguing import.

An evil-acting sickeningly pretty cellist who didn't like her grade school teacher Mi-ju (Hyeon-a Seong or Hyun-ha Sung) decides on revenge. There's something witchy about the girl & when next the teacher plays something on the tapedeck in her car, the cello music induces hallucinations, though the connections between these elements of the film is tenuous to say the least.

When she reaches home, her family is inexplicably absent, & a long spooky sequence cheatingly climaxes with her family leaping out with a "surprise!' birthday party. A whole lot of the film will turn out to be just that sort of red herring or fraud.

A weird young housekeeper (Ho-bin Jeong) comes to work live-in just as Mi-ju begins teaching her autistic daughter Yoon-jin (Yu-mi Jeong) to play the cello. The housekeeper's so peculiar, surely no one would really have hired her, especially around a special-needs child. But let's go with the flow here & pretend that in Thailand they're so hard-up for cheap labor they'd turn an obvious loony loose on the kids.

Autistic or at least ultra-introverted Yoon-jin's new interest in the cello is framed as though eerie from the start. There's no sense that reaching out for a new interest could be a good thing for such a girl, which is symptomatic of the film's inability to see its own contents except through te filter of J-horror, never as a natural result of the film's subject matter.

Japanese horror films have been the primary influence on Thai & Korean horror of the new millenium. As elegant as Cello happens to be, the editing is nevertheless confusing, the characters blandly attractive with insufficient individuality, & a strong reliance on the "girls & women are just scary" routines drawn from basic J-horror.

The Ju-on style of spooky things begin happening in the household & it's all down hill from there, becoming increasingly boring as an imitation of a better films.

The family dog dies; someone tries to run over Mi-ju in a basement garage; the housekeeper lurks like a Chas. Addams caricature; Yoon-jin becomes creepily obsessed with her own bad cello playing; & our heroine's sister-in-law seems to be losing her mind. There's no focus to any of it, it is just an accumulation of bad stuff.

Akin to Ringu's horrification of video tape, it's that cello tape-recording that likely changed Mi-ju's reality from wholesome to doomful, though it's also possible that most of what she experiences is framed by her guilt complex rather than an apparent ghost.

The eerie housekeeper gives the awful tape to the autistic girl who is always scraping away on her cello, & that act does inspire a few moments of intrigue. But when it is weakly explained as a recording of the final concert of a girl who died in a car accident that Mi-ju survived, intrigue flags.

Ji-sook the loony housekeeper turns out to be possessed by Kim Tae-yeon (Da-an Park), the First Chair cello player whose death Mi-ju caused in college. Tae-yeon remains just a commonplace pale-dead-ghost who manages to get much of the family killed not because it makes a weird sense but because that's what is supposed to happen in a derivative horror film. Plus, dull as the family happened to be, good riddance to 'em.

The haunted tape & the cello obsession never pay off well. There are many moments when it seems like there was the potential for a very good movie here, but it never breaks out of its imitation-j-horror box. It might've been a more interesting film if it hadn't tried so hard to present itself as a horror tale at all, & had left out most of the randomly ominous threats.

There should have been an intensity greater than artificial horror just in dealing with an autistic teenage girl who is only happy making terrible scraping noises on a cello. Under the best of circumstances dealing with this sort of special needs child would be full of sadness & heroism & mixed emotions of all kinds. Yet in this tale, it's just another horror-decoration not otherwise consequential & we're supposed to be more interested in a cliche ghost's ill-will.

copyright © by Paghat the Ratgirl