MEMENTO MORI  (1999)  ***1/2

Reviewed 6/9/01

Writer-directors Tae-yong Kim and Kyu-dong Min spent much time researching teenagers, interviewing them and spending time in school classes, and it has paid off.  MEMENTO MORI captures a nice sense of teenage life, its carefree playfulness, easy cruelty, and the shock and pleasure of transgressing established social boundaries.  The movie may sound like a mishmash of genres – coming-of-age romance, supernatural horror, lesbian uncloseting – but it is enormously successful at getting at the core appeal of each genre, that is, until the film dramatically derails in the final 30 minutes.  At this point, it drops its carefully drawn relationships and potent psychological dread for the spectacle of a CARRIE/POLTERGEIST extravaganza.

Cute, naïve Min-ah (Min-sun Kim) stumbles upon a lost diary shared by two of her fellow students, the pale, aloof beauty Shi-eun (Young-jin Lee) and the weird and ungainly Hyo-shin (Yeh-jin Park).  As Min-ah makes her way through the “Alice in Wonderland”-like diary, we get flashbacks of Shi-eun and Hyo-shin’s lesbian love affair, its rise and fall.  Suddenly, Hyo-shin apparently commits a grisly suicide, plummeting from the school rooftop.  While Shi-eun is seemingly unaffected by Hyo-shin’s death, Min-ah is deeply disturbed and all the more so as Hyo-shin starts to literally haunt her.

Despite MEMENTO MORI being their first feature film, Kim and Min show amazing prowess with the camera.  The film is sumptuously lit and the wild array of camera movements and setups mesh beautifully with the material.  The magic hour shot of Shi-eun and Hyo-shin playing by themselves on the roof with Shi-eun running between the antennae achieves melancholy and romance in their solitude.  The abundant accumulation of techniques – fleeting glimpses of background objects, a ghost’s-eye view, crosscutting of parallel actions – is reminiscent of Jack Clayton’s THE INNOCENTS.  MEMENTO MORI seldom resorts to sudden jump scares, but relies more on eerie atmospherics.  To this end, it is far more successful than THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT.

As well done as the horror aspects are, MEMENTO MORI’s biggest strength is how insightfully drawn the characters are.   Shi-eun and Hyo-shin bond while cleaning the school pool, and the scene is an adolescent transformation of punishment into fun.   When Hyo-shin gives Shi-eun a self-mixed music tape, the two girls bob their heads to the sound of the beat.  Min-ah’s two friends (played by Min-hee Kim and Hyo-jin Gong) at first appear only to be wonderful comic relief with their toying with a camcorder and horsing around while getting a health checkup, but they also represent the pressure of peers to Min-ah.

The filmmakers are helped immeasurably by the pitch-perfect performances of all the girls, but they themselves let the material down as they go into the mode of spectacle at film’s end.  Instead of trusting the sway of the characters, they rely on the explicitly supernatural on a mass scale, turning a powerfully intimate movie into another of surface sensations.  Still, for the first two-thirds of MEMENTO MORI, it would be hard to do better as character study and ghost story.