According to her university tutor, the anxiety of our present times stems from the identity crisis that we all feel, yet Ji-won’s (Kim Ha-neul) identity crisis is deeper than even she knows. Having lost her memory following an accident, she takes it as a good opportunity to start again, planning to leave her clingy, widowed mother behind to study overseas. Yet the unremembered past won’t seem to let her go as she’s haunted by a series of mysterious figures that push her towards investigating the person she may have been before.
This is not altogether welcome for Ji-won, as she begins to realise that prior to her accident, she may not have been a very nice person. She begins having visions of being told off by herself and comes to understand that she and her high school friendship group, who have now almost all been killed or gone mad, were involved with bullying another girl, Su-in (Nam Sang-mi), ostensibly because she was poor while they were all wealthy. Further flashbacks hint that she and Su-in may once have been friends, though Ji-won’s financial status improved markedly so that she could join the posh girl group and no longer wanted to associate with someone like Su-in.
Su-in laments that because of their poverty, neither of them had many friends besides each other when they were younger, and that now Ji-won is rich, she’s suddenly friends with everyone, hinting at the rather superficial nature of friendships and the snobbishness of the surrounding society in which relationships are often divided along the lines of social class. Ji-won, however, resents this, rejecting Su-in’s claim that no one was friends with her and insisting she’s nothing like Su-in in deliberately seeking to exclude herself from the ranks of the poor by suggesting she’s innately different. “I’m not who I was,” she ironically says, as if she had been somehow reborn following her parents’ financial success. But at the same time, Su-in has a similar mindset. When Ji-won asks her what she wants to be when she grows up, she replies only “you”, wishing this new future not only of financial comfort but friendship and acceptance for herself.
After joining the mean girl group, it’s as if Ji-won punished Su-in deliberately in order to make it clear that she is not like her and now belongs to this new elite class free of the stigma of poverty. Su-in meanwhile is willing to put up with a degree of mistreatment in order to be accepted by the group and remain “friends” with Ji-won, whom she still seems to care about. It does seem that college student Ji-won is a different, nicer person, who only has one friend in a boy a couple of years older who’s just returned from military service (Ryu Jin). Perhaps having lost her memories she’s essentially a blank slate who never learned these kinds of petty hierarchies as a child and as an adult has a better ability to see how arbitrary and unkind they really are. At any rate, she is not who she was, but is still targeted by a force she has not yet identified, just as she has still not identified herself.
The Ghost (령, Ryeong, AKA Dead Friend) seems to be drawing quite heavily from the J-horror phenomenon, though making its watery spirits and Ouija boards very much its own. The final twist is indeed quite ingenious and completely unexpected, proving that finding the ghost’s body doesn’t always lift the curse, especially if it’s not the one the ghost was after. The screenplay is extremely well constructed, lending a degree of psychological nuance and internal consistency in the constant mirroring of Ji-won and Su-in while hinting that the real terror here may be not just prejudice but what the fear of it will do to someone’s outlook and behaviour, causing them to act in terrible ways simply to prove that they are not the other but only one of us, which is to say someone worthy of respect. That kind of rage, it seems, is not cured by death. Kim Tae-gyeong’s eerie ghost story is drenched in a particular kind of loneliness that suggests all along they could have been friends if it weren’t for social exclusion and the arbitrary stigmas of a highly stratified society.
Trailer (English subtitles)
