| One of the great themes of Korean films is love, or more precisely, the seriousness of love. It struggles through many tests: of time, of competitors, of distracting pleasures, and of the lovers' own selfishness and confusion. It brings as much pain as pleasure--sometimes more pain than pleasure. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn't. The key idea is that the lovers can only understand their lives in terms of their loved ones, and to live without that loved one is to live a kind of death.
With that intensity in mind, I prefer to think of "Epitaph" not as a horror film, but rather as a dramatic film about love, narrated by ghosts. It's beautifully conceived, written, and acted. Its "horror" elements are nicely imagined and executed; and its "love" elements are original, unusual, and convincing. The collaboration between the director and the actors seems ideal, which makes the slowed-down stately pacing of the film impeccable.
At the end of the film you don't feel as though you've witnessed the hard and dangerous times of people who at one time or another found themselves the victims of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, which is the way you normally feel at the end of a horror film. What you get, instead, is the sense of people who have touched the deepest, most beautiful, points in their lives; and the depth and beauty are highlighted and made more intense in the presence of death. |
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