In the Flesh: Gonjiam

It takes skill to build mood, to find the right beats and pace to bring a viewer fully into a manufactured emotional reality. We watch Youtubers Seung-wook and Sung-hoon do just that to their unsuspecting fellow performers, a team of supernatural “experts” and newcomers put together by haunted location exploration Youtube channel owner Wi Ha-joon for a livestreamed tour of the titular Korean asylum. The pair move props, manipulate environments, and generally collude to frighten the other performers to inject the stream with a sense of reality. At the same time, the cast/crew are in their own heightened reality, their lines fed to them by Ha-joon, their exploration mapped out ahead of time. During all this setup and revelation, director Jung Bum-shik deftly sketches the personalities of his sizable cast with a precision not often seen outside the locker room sequence from Cameron’s Aliens, establishing broad traits and tics without sacrificing a shred of momentum. We even get to watch the group bond by launching each other off an inflatable water trampoline and into a chilly lake, their winces and screams caught on go-pro with an unfakeable honesty that immediately generates emotional connection.

It’s a good thing Jung has such a flair for characterization, because the rapidity with which Gonjiam accelerates from “watching people get scared within a cleverly constructed conceit” to “gates of Hell now fully open” is enough to generate significant whiplash. The asylum’s sheer omnipresent malevolence boils to the film’s surface with horrifying speed. Watching the characters themselves realize their own stream contains impossible shots taken by no one precipitates a number of realizations for the viewer as well. Who’s shooting footage of the director, alone in his tent with the streaming equipment? Who’s making the sound of the ping pong ball striking a hard surface in the distance during an earlier sequence? There is a tremendous existential anxiety at the film’s heart, a tension between the desire to exploit a place of suffering and tragedy for cash and fame and a kind of instinctual knowledge not just of the wrongness of the endeavor but of the wrongness of the place itself. The origins of that wrongness are cleverly obscured; a Japanese-run death camp, a Korean blacksite for political prisoners — cultural trauma and anxieties woven together to form an impenetrable canopy.

Perhaps Gonjiam’s single smartest move is to root itself not in the handicam directness of so many of its predecessors but in the highly specific technical milieu of professional Youtube filmmaking. Its characters wear dual camera rigs to film outward and inward at the same time, capturing reactions in disorienting closeup and framing threats and apparitions at a lonely, vulnerable remove. Panoramic shots foreshadow the disorienting spacial distortions which shape the film’s last third, inviting viewers to understand open spaces as malleable and alienating. Jung waits so long to exploit the unique visual opportunities afforded by go-pro technology that it almost seems it won’t happen, and then somehow when it finally does it’s worse than anything one might have imagined. With excruciating precision the film joints and butchers the characters it so lovingly established, tearing them apart in a whirlwind of stunning scares and searing crisis images before ending with a flourish just north of cuteness. One for the books.