Don’t expect anything new or even the least bit original with the Korean horror film “Face”. The movie stars Shin Hyun Jun, of Guns & Talks, as Hyun-min, a widower who works reconstructing faces from skulls. He’s one of the best ones out there, so good in fact that his boss refuses to accept his resignation when his daughter falls ill after an experimental heart transplant surgery, telling him instead to take his work home with him.
Things take a turn for the supernatural when a typical female ghost, complete with the usual long, straight dark hair and pale white face appears out of thin air and begins haunting Hyun-min and his daughter. This compels Hyun-min to get back into his work and he finds himself working alongside Sun-young, played by Song Yoon Ah, an unwanted and unasked for assistant. Predictably, the two starts to grow close and soon Hyun-min is seeing dead women everywhere. Things take a twist at the end when we find out that Sun-young is one of the dead women’s faces he has to reconstruct. She’s been helping him all along the way to find her murderer.
Even though “Face” is far from being original, one thing that could possibly justify it would be its shortness. At just over 85 minutes, it kept the un-originality down to a minimum. Furthermore, who called this a horror movie? I watched this at night with all the lights off and didn’t feel an inkling of nervousness or being scared. This was more of a psychological thriller than anything else, one that would fit nicely into an episode of CSI or something similar.