GUIDE | UNEARTHED

Spider Forest

(Song Il-gon, South Korea, 2004)

BY TOM PHELAN | October 22, 2024
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The guilty mind passes the time by inventing new escapes and tortures. Song Il-gon’s Spider Forest (2004) is the story of a troubled television producer walking back through his memories in search of clues to a savage murder at a cabin in the woods. This is a hidden gem from the stash of South Korean films released in the early 2000s during a wave of robust government funding. It’s a deeply felt, terribly sad film that is guaranteed to frustrate anyone who doesn’t care for the psychological horror of Jacob’s Ladder or Möbius strips along the (broken) lines of Lost Highway. Expect no tidy path through the forest, only suggested routes and plenty of deadfalls.

Kang Min (Kam Woo-sung) wakes up in a forest at night. He enters a nearby cabin and finds a bloody crime scene: one man is dead, and Min’s girlfriend Su-young (Kang Kyung-hun) is about to die, whispering something about spiders. Min finds a sickle—the murder weapon—and pursues an unseen figure through the forest and into a tunnel bathed in orange light, where he is hit by a car. Emerging from brain surgery two weeks later, Min learns that he is the prime suspect. Detective Choi (Jang Hyun-sung), leading the investigation, wants to clear his friend Min, but nothing in his account of that night adds up. Things get even stranger when Min takes matters into his own hands, making for the forest in possession of a key (suspiciously like the dream key in Mulholland Dr.) that a beckoning older patient has given him.

As Min digs into his memories, we get a nonlinear series of flashbacks and unreliable stories. His damaged mind seems to fabricate as much as it remembers, maybe because the truth is too bleak to process. At the heart of his recollection is Su-in, the mysterious owner of an old photo studio near the forest. The actress Suh Jung (known to Western audiences primarily as the mute lead in Kim Ki-duk’s The Isle) plays both Su-in and Min’s late wife Eun-ah in cryptic flashbacks, and she infuses each scene with warmth and a delicate sense of melancholy. Su-in appears to be the locus of some devastating loss, or a wishful dream that Min conjures to soothe his loneliness. In interviews, Song mentions Orpheus as an influence on the story, and it’s easy to see why—in a reversal of the myth, the ghostly Su-in disappears when Min looks away from her. Nothing good in this world lasts long.

Spiders crawl throughout the film, as though weaving the very story. They crawl in the mouths of corpses, and they lower themselves through the air, invading Min’s memories. There is a sense that spiders can be demons or angels—as Danny Aiello’s character says in Jacob’s Ladder—and it just depends on how you look at them. In one lovely scene, Su-in tells Min the secret of spider forest, as they sway high in the air on a chairlift. There are other heart-catching moments: a young girl is lifted by her feet into the sky, missing photo frames leave dusty outlines on a lavender wall, a green-scarfed woman with her back turned watches snow falling in a forest. Even when the story confounds, it delivers beautiful images such as these and follows a sound emotional logic. Patient viewers may find themselves unexpectedly moved. 🩸

TOM PHELAN,

a writer living outside Philadelphia, is currently working on a horror project set in western Pennsylvania. He co-wrote the movie Anamorph, starring Willem Dafoe.

How to see Spider Forest

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