The Uninvited (4인용 식탁) by Lee Soo-yeon (이수연) 2003
21 May 2006I have to say the Korean title of A Table for 4 is more fitting for this enjoyable supernatural drama. This is an enjoyable and dark tale without any happy revelations, it starts dark and ends dark. And I will see any film with Jun Ji Hyun in it, and she is excellent in this, if totally disturbed and seemingly with very little makeup. Not scary, but dark a dark and disturbing tale, that I though was going one place and went someplace completely different. Not scary, but dark and disturbing.
Park Shin-yang (박신양) plays Jung Won a recently engaged and successful interior director, whose fiancée is also a successful interior designer, but his life has a turn for the worse after an incident on a train. On his ride home he sees a woman get on with 2 little girls that sit across from each other on either side, and when he gets off at the last stop he looks back and sees the children still there, leaning back as if they are dead. The next day he hears that 2 bodies of children were found on the train, and he sees them in his apartment sitting in the 2 chairs at his table which his beautiful fiancee has set up with specific lighting focused on each chair. After that he is scared and goes home to his father’s house, which is connected to a church since he is a pastor, and he doesn’t want to go home.
REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS…
One night he has to drive people home from the Church and a girl he saw at a psychiatrist he is renovating for is the last he has to drive home, her name is Yeon (Jeon Ji-hyeon (전지현) in in no makeup in her first role after My Sassy Girl) and she faints on the way home, so he takes her to his apartment, which is in the same complex as her apartment. He searches her pockets and finds a number which she calls to get her picked up, on her way out she says he should put his kids to sleep, and he is blown away. He keeps trying to talk to her, while she is a witness in a court case prosecuting a woman who was a friend of Yeon’s and who threw her baby out window when Yeon had just returned from the grocery store.
Eventually Jung Won talks to her and convinces her to talk to him. It seems her mom was a shaman, and she can see things, and she can help him recover his lost memories from when he was younger than 7, and she has done it for a friend before but it did not turn out well. Still she does it, and she helps Jung Won remember his childhood, with his real father who mistreated him and he set it up for him and his father to die, but tried to save his little sister, but only he was saved, and then he was adopted by the pastor. He can’t deal with it, and can’t deal with her anymore, and his fiancee saw him with Yeon and has left on a vacation.
At the trail when her ex friend is being dragged away, she sees Yeon and jumps and kills herself. And when she is having trouble with her husband she is separated from not only because of the death of her child, but her narcolepsy which started when she saw a woman jump from her building, and looked her in the eyes as she fell. Jung Yon refuses to be there for her as well, and she loses it, saying that they both saw the kids, and how he could see things when he was a kid, and she decides to make him believe that she could see the eyes, and she jumps off his building, and by his window killing herself.
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An enjoyable film, though maybe a little long, but good and enjoyable.
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