Though a perfectly serviceable teen shocker, one would have to say that Phone’s relationship with Ringu represents intellectual cannibalisation on a scale that recalls that of Bill Hicks by Denis Leary, City On Fire by Reservoir Dogs (not that we don’t love you, Quentin), OK magazine by Hello. But as we always say around these parts, if you’re going to steal, go for the big score.
Not that Phone is an unmitigated success as an overly fond homage. Borrowing Ringu’s central trope, Phone features, of all things, a haunted mobile phone number that gruesomely dispatches all those unlucky enough to possess it. Conveniently enough, the cursed SIM card finds its way into the hands of a female reporter (Ji-Won) who immediately gets on the case, stumbling into a torrid, supernatural mystery involving various evil misfortunes, eye-gouching and sexually precocious teenage girls scoring married men. Wow, that must be a challenge for them.
Just to heighten things along, there’s a melodramatic subplot wherein our intrepid heroine has enabled a barren couple to have a child, a terrifying creature, who, thanks to some dodgy white noise down the aforementioned Spooky Handset, becomes possessed by a murderous ghostly schoolgirl. Much to everyone’s dismay, the moppet subsequently decides that she’d quite like to kill her mommy and marry her daddy, so either it’s the malevolent spirit talking, or someone’s been reading her too much Freud.
Intriguingly, in a sub-Videodrome way, Phone seems to posit the notion that your arm doesn’t just end where your mobile begins, and in technophile Korea, that’s probably on the money. Alas, this is no Tetsuo. Any possible machine-body-interface-horror innovations are ignored in favour of deliver-the-goods conformity, and this slavishly formulaic approach is made all the wearing by Ahn’s occasionally plodding atmospherics.
Still, the big, melodramatic Are-Girlfriends-Electra? denoument is not without its charms, while the all-biting, all-scratching beastly brat is the most fearsome under-eight to grace our screens since they stopped manufacturing Culkins.
Warmly recommended to Asian cineastes, horror buffs, Luddites and people who dislike children everywhere.