Bulshinjiok or Distrust Hell (lit.) follows a girl who back to her hometown after knowing her younger sister is missing. Back with her mother who now a religious fanatics and couple or strange things happened in their apartment block, the girl must uncover the mystery.along with increasing frequency of nightmares.
K-Horror cinemas often plays with big twist that most of the time, making the plots entirely of buildups. It's nice, but I recognized most of them aren't that innovative, stale if I may say, due to prolonged cliches that repeated again and again. Luckily, although this movie suffers the same thing, at least most of the buildups are enjoyable.
Living Death revolves around religion theme in Korean society which quite interesting to discuss due to their increasing numbers of non-theism. This movie portray a case where sometimes, we all just need higher beings so that we can rest our incapability of resolving things that out of our control. The big picture is compressed in the main premise of the disappearance of a strange girl that have supernatural ability.
I like how the movie can play the tension well with many body counts, jumpscares, and the searching. It's like they give a structured buildups with little climax that increasing in the next scene. This method has been used by many similar movies, but the movie also used odd characters that make us uncomfortable and curious. In my opinion, the way this movie build the story is one of my favorite in K-Horror list.
Unluckily, the movie also has bitter taste in the end, that quite huge deal for me. Scenes leading to the end is confusing due to sudden differences of the character (a strong-willed woman suddenly turns slow and soft, a rascal detective turns violent and coward), that is not really necessary since the plot is quite solid to usher the ending without any sudden change in the character. Also, things are quite unexplained, in sense that the plot does end a conflict in one side, but the possessed/supernatural things that has been talked prominently in the movie, suddenly goes off.
I'll love this movie more if they can have better plot for the ending, but the experience during the buildup is good enough so that I can overlook many major things that's not executed nicely. It's a solid story on its own, and offer good story for those who like mystery movie and horror movie at the same time.
