31 Days, 31 Horror Reviews Day 16: Cinderella

2006.

Guess what? This is movie #16, meaning we’re OVER HALFWAY THERE. Who is getting tired? Not this writer! All downhill from here, Space Monkeys.

Today’s movie is Cinderella, directed by Bong Man-dae. Let us be clear: this is not the Disney version. It’s spooky season, so there is no Prince Charming, no glass slippers, and no Bibbidi Bobbidi Boo. The 2006 Cinderella is a Korean horror movie about codependency, self-mutilation, and faceless ghosts. That makes it something of a fairy tale of a kind, I suppose. Just a depressing fable of madness and denial, much closer to David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers than wholesome fun for the whole family.

Cinderella starts out as a very different movie than the one it becomes. It is really two horror concepts that overlap, either one of which could have been a disturbing enough movie on its own. At first Cinderella is about a group of wealthy young women in an urban art school, all of whom have begun to use plastic surgery. Their doctor is Yoon-hee (Do Ji-won), the gorgeous mother of their popular classmate, Hyeon-su (Shin Se-kyung). The surgeries are all successful. But then dark side-effects begin to set in. Hyeon-su’s friends start seeing spirits in the dark corners, and then fantasizing about self-harm.

“This is not my face” they all say, eventually. “Give me back my face.” Then they do horrible things to themselves.

For some cultural context, plastic surgery is very popular in South Korea. I've seen statistics claiming that approximately a third to a half of all young women in South Korea have had some kind of facial work done. I am not Korean, so I’ll accept I’m well out of my depth here. There are definitely some complex cultural issues going on here about the shape of eyes and lightness of skin. Attempts to look “more Caucasian” are hardly unique among Koreans, and I feel like I’ve wandered into a very sticky minefield. Is it sexist? Racist? Classist? Almost certainly all three. Cultural concepts of beauty are typically as exclusionary as they are aspirational. But fuck if I’m going to pretend like I have any answers. I feel like it's often just as shitty to be weird and judgmental if women want to look a certain way.

(Plus, my nose could probably use a bit of tweaking anyway.)

I have seen Cinderella described as a satire, but I’m not convinced it is. For one, this is not a movie at all interested in any of those issues I just brought up. The entire cast is made of beautiful young women, often generically beautiful. It is very, very difficult to tell the cast apart apart from Hyeon-su and Yoon-hee. The rest of the girls are less individual characters than a kind of non-specific female collective. You rarely hear their names, they're not supposed to stand apart. By the time Cinderella starts, all of the girls have apparently had their surgeries. We do not get to see the before or after.

I have not seen anything else Bong Man-dae has made, but most of his other films seem to be bawdy sex comedies. The camera’s gaze is certainly not unhappy to stare at pretty young idols. If Cinderella wants to be a movie conservatively denouncing the evils of vapid rich girls getting fashionable faces, it is too in love with the upper-class fashions to have any bite. Ultimately, plastic surgery is just a vehicle to get to the horror. It's as much as satire of surgery as Christine is a satire of cars.

What Cinderella is really about is the ghost hiding in the back of the story. That figure is central to the relationship between Hyeon-su and Yoon-hee. As mother and daughter, their interactions are strange enough before any horror occurs. Yoon-hee is obsessed with her adult daughter’s skin, still bathes her, and seems extremely possessive of her. Even Hyeon-su notices this is not how mothers should treat their fully-growned children, and calls her mother “her husband”. (Men barely factor into Cinderella, it is almost an all-female affair. So interesting choice of gender role there, Hyeon-su.) 

As the movie grows darker, Yoon-hee increasingly seems to be losing track of reality. There’s often two Hyeon-su’s in one scene, one still affectionate and passive, and the other horrified and demanding answers. Yoon-hee cannot tell her daughter apart from a ghost. The audience loses track of who is who too, and that makes for a few great scares.

This is around the time we start to dig deep into what is really happening in this family. Why does Hyeon-su not have any photos from her childhood? Why is there an old woman wandering the streets of their city, still looking for her long-lost daughter? Why do we never see the ghost's face? Does the ghost even have a face? Another better question is: why is this movie called Cinderella. I assumed it was a dark metaphor for the transformation plastic surgery offered. No, this is actually a lot closer to the fairy tale than you might think. Just who is the step-sister and who is the princess?

There is certainly no lack of really great horror coming from Korea over the last twenty years. As far as those go, Cinderella is actually less depressing than most. The Wailing or I Saw the Devil are much, much more miserable experiences. (And admittedly better movies too.) At ninety minutes Cinderella is a crisp, breezy experience in comparison. That might be why it had less of an impact overall. It isn’t high art. But if what you’re after is scares and twisted themes, you’ll get it here. Cinderella is mostly just very solid, not any kind of masterpiece. Recommended though, deserves a bit more love.

Next time we travel to 2007, the year of Cranking that Soulja Boy, the great Bobby Petrino era of the Falcons coming to an end, our next movie, [REC].