Needs More Spook
I love a nice scary story. Lovely bit of blood, chuck in a few ghosts or demons, or if you can, a whole undead horde. Nice stuff. I didn’t use to realise this about myself until a friend told me recently that she hadn’t watched Squid Game because she ‘doesn’t like horror like I do’. I was baffled, and then realised that really enjoying stories with blood in them probably does incline me over to the spookier side of things. So now I embrace it.
An apparent result of this newly realised taste might be that I am less easily scared. This doesn’t feel correct, given how mortally terrified I still am of spiders (no being needs 8 legs, fight me), and how easily I will jump at the mildest of jump scares. Hell, watching A Tale of Two Sisters certainly spooked me, but something like All Of Us Are Dead did indeed go down just fine. Am I (shivers)…maturing?
If we take my experience of the 2019 film Svaha: The Sixth Finger, then maybe I am. Listed on Wikipedia as a ‘mystery thriller’ and tagged as ‘chilling and scary’ on Netflix, this film doesn’t fully sit in horror territory, but is certainly adjacent. It tells the story of a cult-busting priest, played by Squid Game’s own Lee Jung-jae, who investigates a new Buddhist sect that is somehow connected to small town murders of young girls. Bringing in prophecies, rituals, hidden twins, and a good ol’ fight between good and evil, there is definitely a lot going on here. And not an unentertaining lot either, though ultimately this film left me feeling inert rather than chilled in the way I apparently like to be.
The film opens strongly, with a young girl monologuing about her portentous birth, wherein her twin survived by eating her leg (yikes) but ended up born a deformed, well, thing that is treated as a secret demonic presence, locked up in an outhouse. This twin seems to have some kind of power: she is able to send snakes out to bite the ankles of one curious outsider. These girls live in a suitably uncomforting country house, with grandparents who rear dogs in cages that seem to react to every little thing rather viciously. So far, so spooky.
We are also introduced to our investigator priest Pastor Park (Lee), and the intriguing deer mountain cult that he is investigating. Again, there’s a lot to pique interest here; the cult apparently follows an unknown portion of Buddhist scriptures; there are four godly figures, following a prophet; this prophet is fighting a ‘snake’ figure who will appear as a girl and say beautiful things, it’s all here. So, what’s missing?
It certainly isn’t compelling storytelling, or ample use of the religious symbolism and imagery in the background. Through the figure of Park, the investigations into the sect romp along at a nice pace, and the various reveals time themselves well. It was a nice touch to have this story of a prophet trying to find and defeat his nemesis taking place against a backdrop of Christmas in Korea. It’s a particularly odd time here, as the day is a national holiday and decorations do go up in public places, but there is no focus on family or the Nativity Story at all. It’s normally considered a day for couples of all bloody things. The backdrop of a holiday with no religious meaning to the general populace adds a nice underlining of irony to the world that Park discovers.
It is clear that this world references multiple touchpoints of Buddhism throughout. Now, as much as I don’t know a single thing about the religion, it did feel presented here in a knowing and mostly respectful way, such as through the Buddhist monks that Park regularly consulted with to gain more information. Even the title itself contains the word ‘Svaha’, which apparently roughly corresponds to ‘so be it’, something said at the end of a practice or mantra. There is a rich mine to explore here in these religious symbols: it’s exactly the kind of film that could lead one to google a dozen different terms.
However, as much as this story was compelling, its lack of clarity over the finer details, and the tone, stopped it from really wowing me. Part of this, once again, may have been my own expectations. Coming into the story, I felt like I was going to get something more firmly in the horror genre, and the opening really did compound this. The opening monologue, told in dark tones and with graphic imagery, set the stage for something dark. So too did the early shaman ritual (there are almost never enough shaman rituals, shout out to The Wailing), and the later peppering of gothic imagery. Floating crowds of dead girls in a dream sequence, birds hurling themselves at a window, corpses in the concrete, it all speaks to a greater exploration of darkness and the macabre. However, these moments were seasoning to a mystery story rather than the main meat themselves, which was ultimately slightly disappointing as a viewer.
In addition to this, some of the questions I was left with at the end of the film felt unexplained rather than simply left ambiguous. I understand that this is a hard thing to balance in ‘mystery’ style films—if you blatantly spell out every single thing, the story can feel leaden or mechanical. But questions about secondary characters, and the impact of certain events, remained in a way that made me feel as though these elements had been rushed.
Take the twin girls for example. Compellingly played as they are by actress Lee Jae-in, what about their grandparents, who we meet at the opening of the film? We know they have actively been hiding yet feeding the ‘demonic’ twin, and we see the grandmother literally self-flagellating at an altar, but this is taken no further. We meet a Buddhist cult, infiltrated by the Pastor’s sidekick Joseph (Poetry’s Lee David), who have actively been hiding the last follower of the prophecy (played by Bleak Night’s Park Jung-min), and yet they seem totally disposable within the narrative as said prophecy becomes the focal point.
Little details like this ultimately end up blunting the impact of the unfurling story. As often as I was able to go ‘ah, so that’s what that meant’ or ‘ooh, so that’s a thing’, I also found myself at several points going ‘wait a minute, what?’, which isn’t the most satisfying viewing experience. It’s a slight shame, especially seeing as how this area of cults and religion is clearly a favourite of director Jang Jae-hyun. His previous film was another mystery, this time simply titled The Priests, and his other work has touched on similar areas. Svaha was actually quite a popular film, hitting number one in Korea upon release, and it even pissed off the Sincheonji cult (a group of so-called Christian weirdos who basically started the spread of Covid-19 in South Korea but I won’t start that rant now), so that’s all stuff to be proud of. However, for me, it wasn’t bold enough to be scary in its storytelling, or neat enough to be precise with it.
Cults are a wildly common phenomenon here in South Korea, and this film just wasn’t able to answer the question of why. A fun time no doubt, Svaha: The 6th Finger is a solid mystery, that could have been elevated so much more with a bit more spook. And maybe a little more blood.