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Hyo-shin (Park
Yeh-jin) & Shi-eun (Lee Young-jin) are both outsiders in their high school
but become the closest of friends, even writing a joint diary ... but then
something happens, & the 2 are drifting apart, & even their diary goes
amis, as it is borrowed by nosey Min Ah (Kim Min-Sun), who tremendously
enjoys reading about the 2 of them. Then though, Hyo-shin & Shi-eun meet
again, & sneak off to the school's roof ... minutes later, Hyo-shin falls
off the roof. Might it have been suicide ? An accident ? A curse even ? Might
be, but most of the school thinks Shi-eun, who has been a weirdo anyways, has
pushed her over, only Min-Ah, who has seen Shi-eun at the time of the death,
& who somehow has a telepathic link to her, thinks differently, & -
armed with the two girls' diary - she decides to investigate, even though
Shi-eun has little interest to open up to her, while Hyo-shin seems to
terrorize her from the beyond to give back the diary. Min-ah however inds out
about the girls' past, that they had a lesbian relationship going on, until
Hyo-shin started an affair with her teacher Goh, that meant nothing to her but
(understandably) alienated Shi-eun, who as a reaction tried to more & more
avoid her friend. Hyo-shin now tried to win her back at any cost, even if
that meant to come out as a lesbian in front of her class or breaking up with
Goh, even though he impregnated her, but to no avail, Shi-eun, feeling cheated,
has lost all interest in her ... It all culminates in Min-ah finding a shrine
Hyo-shin has built for Shi-eun's birthday inside the school's piano. When
Shi-eun finds the shrine too, though, rather than being touched she only
searches it for an antidote for a pill Hyo-shin has given her when she was
still alive - which is when Hyo-shin's spirit comes to full power & gives
the school a taste of the horrors she can create, & in the process she
drives her ex-lover Goh to suicide, & invites Shi-eun to join her on the
school's roof ... Being part high school-drama, part teen horror,
Memento Mori nevertheless manages to be highly original in terms of
storytelling & of blending the elements (love story, ghost story,
coming-of-age story) with each other, despite some silly plotelements that
eventually lead to nothing (like the telepathic link between Min-ah &
Shi-eun). What keeps the movie to become a virtual masterpiece though is a
rather uneven direction that ever so often favours flashy images over content,
to a point where it gets too lost in its imagery to make sense. This however
does not ruin the movie, which is pretty good nevertheless. By the way, a
sequel to Yeogo goedam/Whispering
corridors only in title & basic theme (horrors in the high school),
Memento Mori is by far the better movie.
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