One night a pregnant woman was sitting in her bathtub with her clothes on, struggling and in labour. What she doesn't realise until it's too late is that there's someone advancing on her from out of the darkness, with terrible consequences... Some time later, Su-jin (Eun-ju Lee) is a news reporter for a Korean TV station with a great idea for a programme concerning the detective she is interviewing. She tries to draw him on the subject of what he's currently working on, something to do with a website, but he good naturedly refuses to open up. Neverthless, Su-jin is persistent, and follows him around, uncovering a bizarre new form of death for certain young women in the area - it has all the hallmarks of pregnancy, yet not only kills the "mother", but there's no baby to be seen. So what is going on?
Good question, as this is one of the murkiest films of the horror boom to come out of South Korea, and indeed East Asia. Scripted by Hyeon-gyuen Han and originally called Hayanbang, it still owes a lot to the predecessors of its genre, most notably Ringu due to the method of the killings, and features that fear of technology so intriguing for a culture so reliant on it. This time it's the Internet that's the culprit, or at least something using the Internet, and we all know what kind of strange people you can meet on there, making for an effective jumping off point - but you could have said that about FearDotCom.
Unborn But Forgotten, not a title that makes a whole lot of sense it must be said, even after you've seen the movie, is better than FearDotCom however, mainly due to the scrupulously rendered atmosphere of dread that director Chang-jae Lim elicits from his gloomy sets and gloomier cast. Among that cast is a reason that perhaps the film had an unwelcome renown, for it was one of the handful of films completed by its leading lady Eun-ju Lee before she committed suicide in 2005. Knowing that merely adds to the ghoulish mood, and contributes a feeling of sorrow that might not have been present had Lee lived longer.
What Su-jin and her chunky polo neck knitwear-sporting detective find out is that the women who have died in weird circumstances have all visited a website that is ostensibly for a women's clinic. However, clicking on this link will in fact serve any ladies viewing their own death warants, as fifteen days afterwards they will die in that strange manner. Su-jin thinks she is already pregnant by her reluctant boyfriend, but after she experiences a ghostly vision from the website she understandably begins to grow uncomfortable, and her investigations, now tied to the fact that she has to stop the effect or lose her life, advance in a desperate manner. But still very slowly. The film is obviously going for creepiness but this means almost ninety percent of it is characters, well, creeping about, usually in darkness, and sad to say if you've seen a number of these types of films, a monotony settles early on. It's perfectly fine, just uninspired for the greater part in its Rosemary's Baby, pregnancy phobia kind of way. Music by Jeong-a Kim.
[Tartan's Asia Extreme DVD offers the Korean trailer and a rambling, on set "documentary" as extras.]
