I Would Like to See It: The Mimic

The Mimic is an odd little film, its pacing erratic, its characters thinly sketched and airless, its setting a slapdash mess in which none of its players are firmly situated. It leaps from scene to scene with manic energy, creating empty airtime like a Loony Tunes character revving up their legs and spooling out a heap of rumpled carpet in their wake. Once it takes off, though, the last forty minutes of the film are one long hot streak, a grisly flashback in which a one-eyed shaman sacrifices his daughter to the spirit of a depthless cavern blazing straight into a final act like something out of The Descent, all echoing galleries and tight squeezes through unyielding stone. The spirit itself, known as the Jangsan Tiger, remains wisely unseen, present only through the slimy, snarling wreck of its shaman servant and the constant hiss and whisper of its voice from the black of the cave through which grieving mother Hee-yeon (Yum Jung-ah) wanders.

Director Huh Jung’s horror conceits are somewhat muddled, a confusing mishmash of mimicked voices, mirrors, and ghostly presences, but if the concepts are lacking the execution is largely sharp. The streaks of fingerprints contained within reflections are a particularly grotesque detail used to good effect on several occasions, and the shaman himself makes for a compelling screen presence, his animal physicality meshing well with his dead eye and sagging, inhuman expression. It’s the titular mimicry, though, which is the film’s biggest success. It’s deployed early on when Hee-yeon takes in a ragged girl she discovers wandering in the woods. The child subtly imitates her own daughter’s voice, even claiming that they have the same name. The film’s adults visibly sense something is wrong, but gradually the sameness seems to comfort rather than disturbed Hee-yeon, who begins to bond with the little girl and neglect her surviving natural child.

The exploration of grief The Mimic presents isn’t groundbreaking; Hee-yeon can’t let go of her vanished son, and so is made vulnerable to the tiger spirit and its deceptive servants who provide the lure of oblivion in the form of a false reunion with the child. Intermittently affecting, her attachment to the spirit child as her own daughter fades into the film’s background might have been a hammer blow in more confident directorial hands. Ultimately, though, it’s Huh Jung’s script that holds The Mimic back. There’s too much going on at too great a rate, and with no time to get a feel for the people whose lives we’re meant to care about. Even the film’s earned and genuinely bleak ending can’t make up for so much basic sloppiness.