[HanCinema's Film Review] "Horror Mate"

Back on June 23rd, "Horror Mate" surged to the top of HanCinema's trending list, suggesting that many readers were looking it up all of a sudden. For what reason, I'm still not sure. There is no recent news about "Horror Mate" or its cast members in Korean or English. I can only assume it popped up in some other country where neither of these are the primary language. All of which is to say, that "Horror Mate" is not a particularly remarkable film.

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It's not a bad film either, exactly. The project certainly benefits from low expectations and a fairly straightforward premise. Min-hoon (played by Park Chang-hoon) and Si-woo (played by Lee Seung-min-V) are boys developing their own horror game in virtual reality, complete with cheesy, blocky graphics. Matters take a turn for the surreal when the girls I-hyeon (played by Choi Seol) and Hyo-won (played by Mun Ye-jin) attempt a more offline version of spooky teen activity, and the two incidents intersect.

That description is somewhat misleading, since what was actually happening with Min-hoon's video game somehow turning into reality ends up being much weirder and only ever exposited in the last scene in what I can only assume was a rather optimistic hope on screenwriter Jung Sang-ha's part for a sequel. Director Hwang Yoo-jung, for her part, does what she can to make the genre material interesting, but is limited by the rules of the virtual reality game never making very much sense.

Director Hwang Yoo-jung, incidentally, also directed the film "Homeless Kwon Jenny" which won three prizes at the Northern Virgina International Film Festival earlier this year. It's a sentimental musical about looking back at life, and is about as far off from "Horror Mate" tonally as you can really get. How or why Hwang Yoo-jung was able to produce either of these projects is a bit beyond me.

Anyway, despite only being ninety minutes along, "Horror Mate" so often feels like it's trying to drag its feet trying to get anywhere that the movie felt a lot longer than that, and even just a few days after watching I struggle to remember many of its plot points. The tension between I-hyeon and Hyo-won is strong, and results in many of the movie's creepier moments. The relationships, or lack thereof, between the characters underscores how they genuinely have trouble distinguishing the real world from the virtual reality of the game.

The jarring, crude appearance of the girl in the game that our main characters are supposed to be trying to save, for example, is the main consistent clue that something's gone wrong. But that's mostly because this polygonal character is the only one that offers particularly straightforward exposition. For most of "Horror Mate" the presumption is clearly that the premise itself is strong enough to carry the overall feature. Unfortunately, it just isn't, unless this premise interests you so much that you don't especially care where any of it is really going.

Written by William Schwartz

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"Horror Mate" is directed by Hwang Yoo-jung, and features Park Chang-hoon, Lee Seung-min-V, Choi Seol, Mun Ye-jin, Jin Seo-young, So Yun-ho. Release date in Korea: 2023/08/25.