ate at night in an all-girl school in South Korea, stuffy homeroom teacher Mrs. Park goes through her class planner and makes a strange discovery. She calls Eun-young, a fellow teacher who had once been a student at the school, and tells her "Jin-Ju is here!" There are strange noises in the hallway. Mrs. Park seems afraid. There's movement in the shadows. Someone walks behind Mrs. Park. ...
The next morning, students Ji-oh and Jae-yi meet in front of the school. As class clerks for the week, they have duties to perform before lessons begin. As they prep their classroom, they find fellow student Jung-sook sitting at her desk. What's she doing in school so early? The two class clerks make a hideous discovery ... the body of Mrs. Park, hanging by the neck, an apparent suicide.
Even though she's now a teacher, Eun-young is haunted by her days at the school and by her friendship with the long-dead Jin-ju. She learns that Jin-ju, who committed suicide at the school, has become a legend among the students. Her ghost supposedly haunts a storeroom that had been, before her death, an art studio. Ji-oh, an apparent psychic, is in contact with an entity that may very well be Jin-ju's spirit.
More deaths occur. The students think it is the work of Jin-ju's ghost. Eun-young faces her past and her relationship with Jin-ju. Certain aspects of that friendship of long ago seem to be playing out now among the students. Is this what is making the spirit of Jin-ju angry? What can Eun-young do to lay the ghost, and her own past, to rest?
A reality as scary as fiction
Whispering Corridors is one of those rare movies in which the supernatural horror isn't as scary as the socio-cultural backdrop in which the film is set. Director and co-writer Ki-Hyung Park has made a fine ghost story that is also a very fine work of biting social commentary. Ghosts need a specific context in which they can haunt the living. Richard Matheson's novel Hell House is a prime example of this. The means by which ghosts appear are as important as the ghosts themselves, if not more so. Whispering Corridors, in this context, isn't a character-driven work; it's character-defined. Whispering Corridors is a brutal indictment of
social hierarchies and the limiting of students' potential for the sake of maintaining a skewed sense of "propriety."
For a first-time director, Ki-Hyung Park does a brilliant job creating mood through the use of framing and perspective; some shots in this film are worthy of framing and putting in a gallery. The school is photographed through a cold and gloomy blue glare that is the visual equivalent of hypothermia. There are moments of brilliant editing, and the film's breaks in narrative chronology create a dreamy milieu in which a ghost seems not an aberration, but an inevitability.
However, Whispering Corridors is undermined by a climax that is overwrought, maudlin and just plain hokey. The emotional power and biting social commentary of the film are nearly undone by a resolution that is, in many ways, a cop-out. The ending doesn't entirely wreck the film, but it does feel like a not-quite-disastrous derailment. Still, the overall power, premise and setting of Whispering Corridors makes it worth a rental.
