20131024: Horror Review--The Pot

The Pot

1. Fundamentals, reception.
1. South Korean live action feature length film, 2008, NR, 113 minutes.  Spoken word is Korean; subtitles in English.
2. IMDB: 5.2/10.0 from 52 user ratings.
3. Rotten Tomatoes: 'No reviews yet,' and no audience responses at all.
4. Netflix: 2.6/5.0 from 7,658 user ratings.
5. Directed by: Tae-gon Kim; written by Tae-gon Kim, Seong-hwi Kwon.
6. Starring: Jung-woo Choi, Hae-yoen Gil.


2. Setup and Plot
1. A family of three (Miae, the daughter; Youngae the mother, Hyunkuk Kim the father) moves to Seoul; the movie starts with moving into the new residence in progress.  Lots of little things show up: the elevator 'open' function is flaky; the drain in the bath is clogged badly with hair; the husband has recently ruined a nail and cannot use his right index finger well.  Bad portents.


2. Hyunkuk is the new CEO of a small firm in Seoul.  The second day he meets his troops. Hyunkuk joins the church of the people who live upstairs.  He becomes friendly with one of them, and drives him to work.


3. The daughter Miae is a handful; this gets worse as the mother's current pregnancy advances.  Miae has an affinity for her grandmother (Hyunkuk's mother).  When the grandmother dies, Miae faints at the burial ceremony.


4. Hyunkuk starts making donations to the church large enough that household expenses get a bit tight.  The pipes start putting out bad stuff that is not similar to water.  One of the air vents starts putting out bad air.  Youngae misses Miae's coming home from school because she went shopping.  The older man from upstairs who had befriended Hyunkuk has gone missing.


5. Financial stress and religious differences, plus a troublesome child and a new pregnancy add up to tension.  Throw in rising business expenses to keep the factory's machines running, and we're getting close to actual horror, if not screen horror.  Another miscarriage scare adds to the worries; the physician warns that repeated miscarriage may result in not being able to have a successful gestation.


6. From the apartment building staff, Hyunkuk discovers that the grandmother's death was not exactly from natural causes. Youngae finds Miae outside on the play set.  Some monster touches her abdomen; she loses the baby.  The Christian ladies from upstairs visit her in the hospital.  They check her out and claim to have taken her to another hospital.  Miae is very well-behaved with Hyunkuk.  He has to face the mess at home (laundry, dishes, mail...) and at work.


7. The babysitter calls him from a hospital; Miae has turned into a raging little ball of anger.  His brother Donsik returned from attending to another family matter.  To deal with the factory's rising cost trend problems, Donsik has sold the factory that Hyunkuk was attempting to run.  Hyunkuk loses his temper with Donsik.


8. Things get worse with Miae.  Things get worse with Youngae; she thinks her husband is Satan, for instance.  She's upset that she's had to clean up after Miae for years, while her own children (as opposed to Miae) have died.


9. So, how does all this end?  Will anything get resolved?  Does anyone go to jail for murders committed?


3. Conclusions
1. One line summary: Young family encounters more than the usual growing pains in Seoul.
2. Two stars of five.


4. Scores
1. Cinematography: 2/10 It's a bit better than VHS, but not much.  The picture in back of the subtitles consistently looks wrinkled.  A fair number of minutes is all jerky motion.  The dark passages were tough to make out, and there were too many of those.


2. Sound: 8/10 No real problems.


3. Acting: 4/10 Wooden, not engaging.  The actor who played Miae seemed more of a brat than an actor.


4. Screenplay: 4/10 There's a story here, I guess.  The narrative does not complete as far as I could see, nor was there much attempt to explain many dead ends in the screenplay.