ishing Stairs is third in the so-called "Ghost School" series begun with Ki-Hyung Park's (Acacia) Whispering Corridors. Each film in the series can be seen on its own.
On the campus of an exclusive all-girls arts school is a flight of 28 stone steps. Legend has it that if anyone walks the steps and counts each one, a 29th step will magically appear, at which time the climber can make a wish that will come true. Ballet students So-hee (Han-byeol Park) and Jin-sung (Song) are best friends. They sneak off campus to go to rock concerts, and they share everything. So-hee loves ballet; dancing is the only time she feels happy. Jin-sung studies ballet because her mother, a frustrated dancer, pressures her to.
Overweight drawing student Hae-ju (Jo, in a pretty amazing performance) lives in a creepy fantasy world of her own. She talks to dolls, draws weird cartoons of herself on the Wishing Stairs and has a private lair in the attic of the school that is intruded upon by mean sculpting student Yun-ji (Ji-Yeon Park).
So-hee overcomes a leg injury just as the school goes in a tizzy over a very competitive scholarship that will send one lucky student to Russia to study ballet. Jin-sung, suddenly desperate to dance in the role of the mad Giselle, climbs the Wishing Stairs and wishes that she would get the scholarship.
Hae-Ju seems to lose a lot of weight almost overnight. So-hee climbs the stairs and wishes that she and Jin-sung will be together forever. An encounter on a different set of stairs seems to make Jin-sung's wish almost a certainty. Are wishes being granted? If so, how will these wishes affect those who make them? Can wishes come true that seem so at odds with the desires of the people who make them?
Human nature is scary enough
Stephen King's Carrie is, of course, a scary story. But what is scary about it? That a mousy girl can move things with her mind, using telekinesis as a kind of amplifier of her inner turmoil? Or is Carrie scary because of the hyena-pack mentality of the kids who pick on Carrie, who create the turmoil that comes back at them through Carrie's powers?
The Wishing Stairs in this movie are, like Carrie's powers, the means by which a teen girl can externalize her inner turmoil. Though, unlike in Carrie, there's more than one angst-ridden girl wreaking havoc among the student body. Wishing Stairs is a consistently interesting film in that it can't be watched passively. The wishes made by the girls brush against and inflect each other, just as the girls' personalities, frustrations and wants brush against and inflect each other. The characterizations throughout the film are very well done and are ultimately crucial to the ticking, overlapping watchwork of psychoses at the center of the narrative.
That both So-hee and Jin-sung want to dance the part of the mad Giselle is as crucial a conceit of the movie as are the Wishing Stairs themselves, as is the fact that weight-obsessed Hae-ju, alone in her room and wearing a sweatshirt depicting Lucy from Peanuts, talks to her plants, urging them to eat and grow strong. All these factors blend together nicely to give viewers a third act that's equal parts W.W. Jacobs' "The Monkey's Paw" and Ansky's The Dybbuk.
Unfortunately, Wishing Stairs is partly undone by a flat and predictable climax (involving yet another "Sadako from Ringu" long-haired ghost), as well as two or three endings too many, leaving viewers with the desire to climb those stairs themselves and wish for a different final act.
