Summary (No Spoilers):
This is the fourth installment of the Whispering Corridors movie series. Aside from the school setting, all of the stories told are stand-alone. This story focuses on the mysterious death of a student in a music classroom. Her ghost is trapped in the school and only her best friend can hear her voice.
In-Depth Review (Spoilers Ahead!):
Young-eon, a student in the music classroom practicing her best friend Seon-min's favorite song, rejects Seon-min's offer to go out, leaving her alone in the school after hours.
The school setting is visually stunning in these night time shots, all bathed in an eerie red with strange wind chimes highlighted. It sets the mood when a strange shadowy figure walks past Seon-min on her way out.
Young-eon is pursued by this strange shadow of a woman and a music note slices her throat in a toss from across the hallway, which does seem a little silly. Maybe the attacker has some Carrie-like powers. The students should watch out for forks and knives in the cafeteria.
Young-eon realizes what happened to her the next day when no one can hear her and passing students walk right through her face, which did look pretty cool in terms of special effects. The only one who can hear her is Seon-min, who is reluctant to acknowledge her out of a fear she won't be able to see her when she opens her eyes.
Seon-min comes around because she wants to help figure out who killed Young-eon, and she suspects the music teacher, who she thinks she saw walking around at night when she left the building. There's also the added motive of jealousy, as the music teacher lost her ability to sing after an illness.
Young-eon, left alone in the school building, begins to see strange, mystical shimmering visions, changing the scenery around her. These flashbacks focus on her time with her sick mother in the hospital and her time spent with the music teacher.
In the meantime, Seon-min befriends a strange girl named Cho-ah who seems to commune with the dead and was in a mental institution for a year. But Young-eon and Cho-ah don't seem to be fond of each other, their motivations a mix of jealousy and distrust. It makes it difficult to tell which one is the right girl for Seon-min to trust. And in a way, it plays out much like a typical love triangle, especially with the Whispering Corridors series having a history of queer themes.
The music teacher kills herself around this time, hanging from a rope around her neck. There's a strange track playing near her dead body, with ghostly music as only Young-eon can hear the singer on the track, not Seon-min.
But it's pretty clear Young-eon's memory isn't quite right because she's surprised when Seon-min tells her she was never invited over to her house before, so she's never even seen pictures of Young-eon's dead mother. This issue is only pressed on when Cho-ah insists ghosts have distorted memories and Seon-min should be careful trusting her in one of their talks outside together.
Young-eon's body is found half crushed in the elevator, which proves that she did actually die, but not in the way she remembers. And a lot of details start to slot into place, as her memory begins to fracture when she reaches the elevator in her memories. But there are still details left that don't make sense.
Seon-min wants to let go of Young-eon after her talks with Cho-ah, but Young-eon is desperate to keep her voice, so she convinces her to continue investigating.
Young-eon seems to get more mentally unstable as the movie progresses, as her visions become darker. It becomes clear Young-eon convinced her mother to commit suicide when she was too young to understand what she'd just done. And then she meets a ghost named Hyo-jung, who fought with her over the affections of the music teacher.
Seon-min uncovers further details about this strange girl named Hyo-jung with the same singing voice as Young-eon, who many of the students were saying killed herself alongside the music teacher as they were lesbians in love with each other, and it turns out that was true for Hyo-jung, who was in love with her music teacher, though the affection wasn't returned. It comes out that this feud was what killed Young-eun, as Hyo-jung killed her in a jealous rage and the music teacher killed herself out of guilt, which should've been enough for Young-eon to move on, but the rift between the two girls continues to grow, as it simply isn't enough for Young-eon, who wants to live.
This is when the movie starts to get confusing to me, even if it's interesting, as there are simply so many characters and pieces of the puzzle, so it does seem like the type of movie that might become clearer to understand after multiple watches, but obviously that is a slight flaw to the story.
Young-eon meets with a twisted reflection of herself, learning this was never Hyo-jung at all, because Hyo-jung is dead. And it is all Young-eon's fault. She is responsible for killing Hyo-jung, who was a ghost like her, and she stole her voice by taking the music teacher's attention away from her and later killing the music teacher to get rid of Hyo-jung for good. How this is done is seriously confusing, but it does seem to be with Carrie-like psychic powers, as Young-eon never seems to lift a hand to kill anyone, choking the music teacher to death with wires at the move of a hand.
This ends in Young-eon making the decision to kill Cho-ah with little pieces of broken glass, leaving her dead on the floor covered in blood, before she moves on to Seon-min, taking over her body to become her.
This leads to the question of how often this cycle has continued, as Young-eon in Seon-min's body looks at herself in the mirror and tells her reflection "Seon-min, I love you." How many girls has she loved so much she stole their bodies? Was Young-eon even Young-eon?
The movie ends with Young-eon talking to Seon-min's mother about how she will learn to drive as soon as she is old enough, the same conversation and the exact same word choice as a vision Young-eon had of a conversation with her deceased mother.
And as the movie fades into credits, Cho-ah can be seen screaming without a voice, stuck in the same place as so many other girls had been, raising more questions than there are answers. But it is a chilling visual to end on. Very creepy!
There is so much to this story left untold, a lot of potential wasted in the confusion of the narrative, but it really gripped me throughout, especially the acting of the three main girls (as this was actually their debut film!), so I'll give this a 4/5 rating.
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