Black House

A Kadokawa-CJ Entertainment co-production, Black House is based on the Japanese writer Kishi Yusuke’s award-winning early novel, concerning an insurance claim adjuster who gets sucked into a terrifying web of deceit, mutilation and murder spun by a psychopath who makes Norman Bates look like Sponge Bob Squarepants. The novel has already been filmed once in 1999 by the star director Morita Yoshimitsu (Family Game, Lost Paradise), a not-bad adaptation with a rather strange, serio-comic tone featuring a bravura performance by Otake Shinobu and unusual tools of bodily harm such as a yellow bowling ball covered with glass shards. Overall, it was not a bad thriller, but apparently neither the original author nor Kadokawa honchos liked it. Realizing that they had good source material that could be exploited further, Kadokawa decided to hand the tale over to CJ and producer Yu Il-han (himself a horror writer) for a Korean take.
Let me get this out of the way first: as an adaptation of Kishi Yusuke, whom I am a big fan of, the Korean version Black House leaves much to be desired. Especially in its first half, the movie tastes a bit like processed cheese: indeed, in some aspects it has the outlook of a Hollywood remake of an Asian genre film, with the level of gore and violence cranked up but much of the appeal of the original’s characters and twisted narrative turns compromised. Lee Young-jong’s screenplay invents a rather hackneyed childhood trauma for the protagonist Jun-o (which predictably gets resolved in a cliffhanger finale), while reducing one of the novel’s most fascinating and complex characters, the company “enforcer” Miyoshi, into a crude thug with fondness for dental floss.
Despite these weaknesses, however, Black House works as an effective psychological horror film, miles ahead of the usual PSC (Pointless Sadako Clone)-infected summer season drudgery. Like, say, Blood Rain, the movie’s power is greatly enhanced by its superb production design (supervised by Jo Hwa-sung and others) and competent cinematography/lighting (Choe Joo-young, Fly Daddy Fly, and Lee Sung-jae, The World Of Silence). The psychopath’s lair, with its makeshift abattoir-operating room ambiance, smeared with blood and filth, is impressively frightening and gives the actors ample room to realistically portray their ordeal at the hands of the villain.
Hwang Jeong-min, one of the most reliable character actors working in Korea today, makes for a thoroughly believable and sympathetic hero, even when he seems to function as a mouthpiece (again) for a Hollywood-style liberal faith in the essential humanity of the monster. Yoo Sun, who previously starred in the interesting misfire The Wig, was a surprise choice for the handicapped mother of the dead boy, but is very convincing as a woman with an eerie emptiness in her gaze that men mistake for numbness induced by grief or emotional exhaustion.
The film culminates in a series of rather preposterous but extremely suspenseful Grand Guignol confrontations, which, to my surprise and relief, did not lead to a surreptitious “rehabilitation” of the main villain through the intrusion of melodramatic conventions. The monster remains the monster to the bitter end, and there is no sexual abuse, Freudian complex or an “unrequited desire to be loved” to explain away why it became the way it did. By honoring Kishi’s pitch-dark conclusion and putting the utterly conscienceless (but not unattractive) monster at the center of the movie, Black House ultimately manages to recover much of the good will initially lost by the rather slapdash way it chose to adapt the novel.