AllMovie

Lee Soo-youn's odd, creepy, glacially-paced drama The Uninvited has a few startling and disturbing moments sprinkled throughout its excessive running time, but the filmmaker seems much more interested in maintaining the film's depressive, dread-ridden tone (amplified by cinematographer Jo Yong-gyu's long shots and coldly fluorescent interiors) and in keeping the audience off-balance than in telling a coherent, believable, or meaningful tale of woe. It starts with a seemingly simple, but compelling premise: Jung-won (Park Shin-yang) seems to feel a nagging culpability for the deaths of two little girls he noticed on the subway, and soon finds himself haunted by them. The film adequately conveys a distinctly urban sense of loneliness and alienation. But the more Lee reveals, the less compelling the story is. The pieces don't fit together, and odd little ideas are left undeveloped and abandoned, leaving the viewer frustrated. Jung-won is a dementedly passive movie hero, and Park's somnambulant performance never quite draws us in. Jeon Ji-hyeon, an overnight sensation in My Sassy Girl, doesn't have much to do here other than mope around perplexingly, occasionally taking time out to faint or weep. The plot, we eventually learn, hinges on her character's otherworldly ability to telepathically communicate suppressed childhood trauma, and one of the two traumas so described (and briefly visualized) is so ludicrously unconvincing that it weakens the structure of the entire film. The Uninvited raises high expectations with its slow buildup, but fails to deliver a satisfying payoff.