BLACK HOUSE

The insurance inspector Jun-oh is sent to a dilapidated house in the suburbs as his first assignment and there he discovers the corpse of a hanged child. Despite the tragedy, Chung-bae, the child's stepfather, seems exclusively interested in collecting the life insurance policy on his son. The case is closed as a suicide, but Jun-oh believes that it is actually a murder orchestrated by Chung-bae and therefore blocks the payment of the policy and begins to investigate him. The insurer discovers that Yi-hwa, Chung-bae's wife and the mother of the deceased child, is covered by a very high insurance policy and therefore tries in every way to warn the woman of the potential danger that her husband represents. Among the many summer releases, here comes "Black House", a Korean thriller that, for once, does not tell stories of vengeful ghosts, but rather the singular odyssey of an insurance inspector who encounters a greedy killer who kills his loved ones to collect the life insurance policies on them. Although the story may sound original to some, "Black House" is the remake of the modest (in terms of budget) "Kuroi ie" ("The Black House" for the international market), a Japanese thriller directed in 1999 by Yoshimitsu Morita and unreleased in our country; moreover, the Japanese film was the adaptation of the best-selling novel of the same name by Kishi Yusuke, so nothing too innovative. But in the end, there is not much that is innovative and truly original in this "Black House" even for the Italian viewer, because if we go beyond the unusual (for thriller/horror cinema) profession of the protagonist and the motive of the killer, we are faced with a film that is too derivative of the modern American thriller with strong tones. Starting with the protagonist Jun-oh, played with great skill by Jeong-min Hwang ("A Bittersweet Life"), the classic anonymous individual with a little active social life, frustrated and with an unhappy family life due to the failed marriage; the Mr. Nobody victim of events who will find himself wearing the "hero's" clothes against his will. A somewhat stereotypical character who, however, works quite well in the context in which he acts... a little less the narrative structure that alternates too sharply rhythms and genres. In fact, "Black House" is divided into two perfectly separable parts: a first one with a social drama cut and a really too slow rhythm, a second one of investigative thriller that ends in horror with a fast pace. The first part, the drama one, tries to depict, not very effectively, the squalor of life in the suburbs of the Korean metropolis, comparable to a same squalor observable in the solitude of the bourgeois protagonist's life. Two ways of describing the "lack" which, on the one hand, is given by the absence of human bonds, on the other, by economic poverty that pushes to horrible acts. Unfortunately, these meanings must be extracted and the description of the personal situation of Jon-oh and his client Chung-bae is not very interesting for the viewer, pushing the same to an easy yawn. The situation changes radically when we start to enter the thriller that even turns into splatter in some very gratuitous ideas inserted in the ending. At this point, the film takes off, gains a lot of rhythm, but also becomes incoherent at a logical level and falls into some sensationalist blunders typical of the most shameless and well-known "cassette" thriller. Nothing wrong, for charity, but the two souls of "Black House" do not manage to coexist and it seems almost that the second part of the film was made to please the Western audience. The debut director Terra Shin does well and shows to have a good visual taste, surely helped also by the beautiful opaque photography of Ju-young Choi. In conclusion, "Black House" does not fully convince, especially for the inequality and the too much impersonality, it can be watched once, but already at a second viewing one is too tempted to keep the fast-forward button pressed.