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Synopsis: The fox stairs at a certain Korean girl's school have a curious legend attached to them. If someone counts the twenty-eight stairs as they ascend, a twenty-ninth stair may appear. If it does, the fox spirit of the stairs will grant a wish. Ji-seong desperately wants to win the school's ballet contest, which will send her to ballet school in Russia. Unfortunately, her best friend, So-hie, is also in the competition, and it is obvious to everyone that So-hie is the most gifted dancer in the school. So Je-Seong makes a wish on the wishing stairs. She's not the only one to make a wish. There is also sad, overweight Hye-ju, who makes her own pact with the fox stairs. When an accident takes So-hie out of the dance competition, the promise of the wishing stairs seems to manifest itself to Je-Seong. She wins the competition. But when So-hie leaps to her death in the aftermath, Je-Seong begins to see the looming consequences of her wishes. Meanwhile, Hye-ju has wished So-hie's return....
Third: Wishing Stairs is the third in the popular "haunted girls' school" movies from Korea. At a guess, I'd say that it won't be the last, but even this one may be one trip to the well too many. Absent are the close attention to natural characters and relationships from Memento Mori, this film's immediate predecessor. The characters in Wishing Stairs are types rather than fully fleshed human beings. Absent, too, is the melancholy of the first film, Whispering Corridors, as well as the veiled social criticisms found in both films. Wishing Stairs is more overtly a "horror" movie than the previous two movies. Many fans of conventional horror movies chafe at the notion that the first two movies are "horror" movies, given that the overall thrust of the films is tragic romance of a type rather than fear. No such claim can be made for Wishing Stairs. In addition to the inclusion of more on-screen violence, the film's back end is stitched together from fairly un-ambiguous source materials. The last act is a patchwork of tropes taken from "The Monkey's Paw," Carrie, The Shining, Bucket of Blood, and (of course) that ubiquitous wellspring of Asian horror, The Ring. In turning away from the concerns of the first two movies, this may placate the more bloodthirsty horror fans who don't much care for these films, but it also robs the series of what made it distinctive in the first place.
Craft: While the film is more conventional than its predecessors--to its detriment, I think--Wishing Stairs does follow the recent trend in Korean filmmaking of making the absolute best film possible even from dicey material. To this end, the film is impeccably well shot, with eye-pleasing deep-focus shot compositions throughout. The performances are mostly first rate within the confines of a script that provides little latitude for fleshing out its characters. The techincal accomplishment of the film rescues it some from the hackneyed mechanisms of its script, but not totally. The film's set-pieces are expertly deployed, too. Perhaps the most glaring misstep is the fat suit An Jo wears in the first half of the film, but then, fat suits don't work in mega-budget Hollywood films, either.
In all, I wish the film aspired to more. Neither of the first two films in the series had particularly lofty ambitions, but both of them moved beyond a mechanical trap designed to provide canned thrills. The first two films had subtext. This one does not. I wrote of this film's predecessor that the horror idiom is a powerful mirror for all sorts of psychological states. While Wishing Stairs is peripherally about ambition and competition among teenage girls, it doesn't explore them in any meaningful way. It doesn't look into that mirror. For this film, the core of its psychology is a plot device more than an end in itself. All of which is too bad, really, because the film really does look good. Alas.
9/14/2005