Jung-Won, a successful architect, takes the subway home one night and falls asleep on it. He wakes up at the very last stop and when he has left the train, he sees that two girls are still inside of it and it looks like they're sleeping. Later, when watching the news, there are reports of two girls that has been found murdered on the train that Jung-Won was riding, and he soon starts to see the two girls appearing and sitting at his dining table. He then encounters a woman that faints and takes her back to his apartment, and when she wakes up and is about to leave, she asks why he hasn't put his kids to sleep yet. Apparently this mysterious woman can see the dead girls too, and not only that, she seems to be some sort of spiritual medium. Soon Jung-Won finds himself drawn into the world of the supernatural.
I've been avoiding The Uninvited for quite some time, mainly because it didn't seem to be that interesting and for a while I found myself to be quite feed up with Korean horror. I was partly right since while The Uninvited has a pretty interesting story and a lot of things going for it, it still didn't manage to deliver the whole way. Biggest reason for that might have been because how brutally slow the movie was. I have no problem with slow movies whatsoever, and sometimes I find movies being slow also being more effective in the end. But this one was just way too slow without ever giving you that little extra thing that in the end would make it all right after all.
I must say that I found the story to be quite interesting, dealing with the supernatural and the way they had set things up. But at so many places in the movie, there are scenes that could've lasted half the time and still been effective, instead of lasting as long as they did. To be honest, I think this is the slowest Korean flick I've ever seen, and I've seen a lot from all genres. It actually took me two viewings to finish watching this since after the first hour I found myself being bored out of my mind and couldn't take it any longer. I watched the next half the next day, and while it was slightly better, it was still beyond slow. This is something I never do, that is not watching a movie from start to finish, but here I couldn't help but doing so since I was pretty sure I would have fallen asleep otherwise.
 
For being a horror movie, it does not deal with actual horror that much. It's first and most a drama flick that has a story that touches the supernatural. There are two scenes that will wake the viewer wake up, both of them that deals with kids and are pretty horrific. Especially one of them came rather unexpected and made me wake up from my slumber, and I thought that wow, maybe this movie will do something for me after all, but then it just got back to being drawn out and boring again. It's all too bad since it has a lot of things going for it and I felt that The Uninvited really could've been something, unfortunately that was not the case.
I don't wanna diss this movie too much since after all it has all these little things that were great, but when looking at the movie as a whole, it is just way too drawn out to be able to stay interesting and not become a bore. The atmosphere is great though, and the camerawork is really top-notch, that is actually something to look out for when watching this movie. The acting is also very good and it has a nice score that goes well with the movie. But in the end, even if it has all these lovely features, it is still so darn boring and since you can never escape from it being so, it drags everything down a lot.
Has a lot of things going for it but is way too drawn out which makes it truly boring to watch and that is a shame because it had a lot of potential to begin with. Even if it's not supposed to be a proper full-out horror movie, there are still not enough scares, and the very few scares that actually are there are all too far apart and most of the time non-effective. Don't take my word for it but watch it for yourself, but be prepared for extremely slow pacing.
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ALTERNATIVE TITLE: 4 Inyong Shiktak
MOVIE YEAR: 2003
DIRECTOR: Su-yeon Lee
WRITING CREDITS: Su-yeon Lee
GENRE: Horror, Drama, Thriller
CAST: Shin-yang Park, Ji-hyun Jun, Seon Yu
COUNTRY: South Korea
RUNTIME: 123 min
RATING: 5/10
Uninvited, The Website/IMDB Click here
Uninvited, The Trailer Click here
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