The Ghost Station is a new supernatural mystery film that is a Korean-Japanese co-production and is centered on perpetually unlucky journalist Kim Na-young (Kim Bo-ra). She seems to have landed the scoop of her career when her friend Choi Woo-won (Kim Jae Hyun) tells her of strange things that have been happening at Oksu Station (where he works) in the aftermath of a suicide. In an effort to prove herself to her boss, Na-young looks deeper into the story; what comes to light is a curse that strikes people down indiscriminately.
There is a part in The Ghost Station, during Na-young’s investigation, where she meets with his sister. She shares that her brother was looking for a well that was on the land where the station now stands. The well has also been the subject of visions Na-young experienced under hypnotherapy concerning her childhood. You might chuckle and begin to wonder if it is Sadako (or maybe it would be more accurate to say her Korean remake counterpart, Park Eun-suh) that we’re dealing with. That was in jest, but honestly, once certain elements are discovered about what happened are added to the nature of the curse and how it’s spread, it’s a fair comparison. Compounding it is the fact that Ring screenwriter Hiroshi Takahashi worked on the script.
Also behind the script is Koji Shiraishi, director of films like Noroi, Cult, and the criminally underseen, Senritsu Kaiki File Kowasugi series. He is a filmmaker that doesn’t shy away from concepts that are a little out-there, which is why his presence here in this very simple curse story is surprising. Even the film’s director, Jeong Yong-ki, is nothing to brush aside having directed The Doll Master, an uneven film that still has some solid ideas. So the team here are not amateurs, they know what they’re doing. How then did they manage to make something so basic?
The Ghost Station‘s opening is easily the strongest sequence. It is an almost exact interpretation of the original online comic by the artist Horang that the film is based on. This sequence taps into why spaces such as nearly empty train platforms can be creepy. It has the quality of a story you hear in a YouTube compilation of online urban legends you watch at 3 am. It’s not that The Ghost Station goes downhill after that, but while the story is interesting enough to hold attention, it lacks any kind of atmosphere. Something that doesn’t help is that what amounts to scares are just a few messed up looking ghost kids popping up, and one semi-decent use of a phone camera’s facial recognition function.
There’s nothing distinctly bad about The Ghost Station, but also nothing that really stands out. It is all a lot of what audiences have seen before. The characters and performances are fine, with the exception of a member of the police who serves zero purpose. The Ghost Station is certainly better than a fair few of the Asian horror films from recent years, but that isn’t saying much. It is the kind of film that is perfectly enjoyable while watching, if not exactly big on scares, but the second you start thinking about it any deeper, you realise it doesn’t quite work.
The Ghost Station
Summary
A disappointing interpretation of Horang’s source comic, The Ghost Station has a few glimmers of hope, but they take some digging to unearth.
The Ghost Station was reviewed at Pigeon Shrine FrightFest 2023.
