Cello

Review

My luck on horror films has not been going well lately, I think. This is yet another horror movie that I consider pretty much a dud. It uses as many cliches from Asian horror films as it can and it ends up becoming confusing. The end of the movie helps to tie things up quite well, but getting to the end is the challenge.

I actually considered not even bothering to finish the film and do the review, but I struggled through.

I really, really don't like films where very young children suffer terribly even though they have done absolutely nothing wrong. In this case you have a very young kid and one whose slightly older, but is disabled. There's not really any need for this type of thing.

Couple this with the hodge-podge mess of the film and you end up with a film that's just there for the gore. Definitely avoid this film.

Synopsis

Playing Ave Maria.

Victim of a car wreck.

Professor Mi-ju Hong. There is something physically wrong with her, headache-wise or something like that.

Sun-ae, her friend.

A former (angry) student confronts Mi-ju. She blames the professor for giving her a bad grade and threatens her.

She puts a cassette tape she got from someone into her car's player and when it starts playing she has strange reactions and loses control of the car.

It's her birthday. Yoon-jin is one of her daughters (and she seems to be autistic or has something similar.) Apparently Mi-ju had been taking medications during her pregnancy with Yoon-jin and blames herself for Yoon-jin's disability even though the doctor said the medications had nothing to do with causing Yoon-jin's problem. Yoon-hye is her other, and younger, daughter.

Yoon-jin and her mother are out shopping and she has her mother stop in front of a music store.

The woman on the left is an new housekeeper who also is probably evil. The other woman is someone else who lives there. Apparently the housekeepers family had been killed in an accident in which she was the only survivor.

There is some kind of presence in the bedroom.

Next day the barking dog is found dead.

A car almost runs her down in a parking garage. (Of course, you really shouldn't walk in the middle of the lane when you are in a parking garage in the first place.)

The Aunt is looking strange. (She had probably been watching the dailies as the this movie was being shot.)

The other woman gets worse looking. Apparently the guy she was supposed to marry is out of the country and cheating on her.

The phone is ringing even though it's not connected.

Someone starts to come out of a photograph as the aunt looks on. The aunt is apparently pushed out through the window.

Yoon-jin finds her aunt hanging outside her window.

Mi-ju's husband finds an odd photo album.

She finds a dead bird with maggots in her locker at the college where she works.

(How many cliches are there going to be? The photo album with pictures with faces scratched out, a strange presence creeping under the covers and a face appearing, a telephone ringing when it's not connected, dead animals, a daughter with a disability, and we're not even half way through the film yet.)

Mi-ju confronts the girl and slaps her and they end up at the police office with the mother of the girl trying to talk her way out of everything.

While stopped at a light her windshield is hit and starts to shatter in slow motion, and then a dead person seems to drop on her hood and then suddenly isn't there and the windshield is normal.

Her husband asks her about some girl that was in a class of hers. It's the person in the photo album whose face is missing from the photos.

Then she says she didn't kill the girl.

In the past, it's the night of their “graduation recording.” Apparently Mi-ju is the better of the two cellists (her and the girl from the class when she was also a student), and the girl was tired of being in Mi-ju's shadow all the time. There was a car accident (the girl's fault), and the girl was killed and Mi-ju's wrist cut badly.

She goes to a recital and everyone seems to disappear.

The girl who had died in the car wreck appears on the stage in place of the woman who had been playing.

The young daughter goes to the older daughter's room, the cello disappears from the older daughter and appears in the case and things start growing on the walls.

Suddenly the youngest daughter is transported outside.

The girl falls to her death when her older sister lifts her fingers up one at a time and she loses her grip. Now, here's a point where I really object. Horror films involving possessed young girls who eventually recover I can handle; horror films involving really young girls being killed for no good reason at all is a little beyond what is necessary or tolerable.

For some reason Mi-ju is not telling her husband what happened. The only reason I can think of that is that their elder daughter would probably be put away in an asylum and she would lose both her daughters.

The husband realizes something is wrong. He uses his cell phone to call his daughter's cell phone and he hears it behind the basement door. He goes down into the basement even though the electricity has gone out.

He finds his daughters body and his wife tells him to calm down.

He starts to strangle his wife, thinking she killed their youngest daughter. She pushes him off and he falls back against a large protruding nail and is killed.

The housekeeper turns into Mi-ju's friend that died in the accident.

Then there's another flashback of the accident, but this time with Mi-ju driving the car and mad at the other woman. (Apparently Mi-ju was considered second best to the other woman as far as playing the cello goes even though there's a scene which the translation indicates the exact opposite, then the next scene backs up Mi-ju's being second best.)

Apparently the car ended up teetering over a ledge. The woman fell out and asks Mi-ju to save her from falling. In this reality, she lets the girl fall to her death and as the girl falls she scratches Mi-ju's wrist.

Mi-ju sees the other woman again and stabs her in the back. It turns out to be the houskeeper. (Who appears to be stabbed in the front, not the back.) She then runs to her elder daughter's room and finds her cello playing itself, so she destroys the cello with a golf club.

Then it turns out that she killed Yoon-jin and the cello is in the bed.

Then it turns out that Mi-ju is in the hospital, recovering from the accident, and is only under the delusion that her entire family is dead.

At the hospital everyone shows up, quite alive.

Then we go back to the early part of the movie where she gets home from the college and no one appears to be in the house but it turns out to be a birthday party for her.

Then a hand appears and it seems that everything is going to keep repeating itself over and over.


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