Cello: A Movie About an Evil Cello

I have to warn you, this is a real Asian horror movie with real Asians acting like Asians and speaking Asianese. It’s not like when they put clever eye makeup on Devon Aoki in Sin City or David Caradine in that old Kung-Fu show, and this isn’t like that Kill Bill movie. The characters in this movie don’t show anywhere near as much feistiness or leg as Lucy Liu. These are the real Asians, they’re pretty calm, polite, average people who don’t spend their days studying martial arts but actually have families and regular jobs.

For those of you who want to get a bit more specific about where in Asia this film takes place we’ll use the facts of the film for the process of elimination. The characters have their own bedrooms and seem to be able to turn around without tripping over somebody, so it’s not Japan. The main character has two children, they’re both daughters, yet she doesn’t try to dispose of them in any way, so it’s not China. There’s no commentary track or executive producing credit for Kim Jong Il and no messages about how great communism is, so it’s not North Korea. The characters react negatively to being stabbed as opposed to taking it as a sign of employment, so it’s not Thailand. So you guessed it: it’s South Korea!

There’s a lot I really liked about Cello. It keeps you guessing even though it has a lot of clichés of this genre. The film is titled Cello, and the poster art is of a blood-covered cello, so you know that cellos have something to do with what’s going on, but you still keep guessing about the nature of the menace. There’s lots of cellos in this movie and lots of people who listen to records of cellos. They buy a new cello, but it’s from a regular retailer and not some dodgy gypsy who gives them discount because its last three owners mysteriously died.

The film sets up lots of possibilities for why the lead character is being menaced. She is a cello instructor who has recently been threatened by a disgruntled former student. She has a creepy retarded daughter. It’s established that she may not be perceiving things completely accurately because she takes lots of medication and has suffered a recent tragedy that has left scars on her arm. The family has recently hired a creepy maid with no tongue and several suicide attempts on her resume. This isn’t like one of those dumb horror movies where a bunch of idiots can’t figure out that their problems all started when they moved into a house where horrible murders occurred. Or how bad things happen whenever that spooky kid they adopted is around. You really are in the dark as to how all the pieces fit together and what is causing haunting.

There’s lots of clichés of the Asian horror genre and there’s one I have to warn you about because it might be a dealbreaker in terms of whether you see a movie about an evil cello or not: she’s back.

Yeah, that’s right, that creepy mute girl with long black hair and the chalk white complexion. You loved her in The Ring, she gave the strongest performance of the cast in The Grudge, you thought she was slumming a bit when she took that cameo in The Amityville Remake, and you might have had your fill of her shtick. Frankly, I think she’s gotten kinda typecast. I was hoping they’d make her the new James Bond woman or she’d bust out with a screwball comedy, but she seems to accept how audiences want to see her. She’s grown up a lot and has at least learned to practice better hair care in this film and has learned how to walk like a model. I fear that, like Drew Barrymore, she might be heading towards skankier horror roles and we might see her in a re-imagining of Doppelganger or when Daniel Craig signs up for the reboot for the Poison Ivy series. I’m really waiting for a DVD package that boasts a commentary track with this chick, as a mute she’d probably step back and really let us appreciate the visuals of her films more than those chatty celebrity types.

I think there’s a reason these ghost roles keep going to this chick and not Michael Clarke Duncan; The Exorcist was a hugely influential film in Asia. They even pay homage to it in this film. You know how in The Exorcist the geography of the house never really added up. A guy falls out the window and somehow ends up on a stairwell across the street. Stuff like that. This film is really big on honouring that tradition. It seems that the same bedroom in this film can either be on the top or bottom floor depending on whether the plot needs a character to fall out the window or watch somebody who fell off the storey above fall by (lots of people go out windows in this movie). The house also alternates between having two and three storeys depending on the characters’ need for privacy and the such. It also has two or three front entrances.

I really liked that in Cello our favourite ghost has finally got them to write her a character with more personal motivation. There’s a reason she’s haunting this family. Most of these movies make the ghost some big asshole that’s just out to ruin somebody’s vacation for no good reason. The ghosts have more powers, but they’re really just psychologically the same as those food service workers who spit on your food for no reason. There’s a good story between the living and the dead characters in this. This film deserves a Nobel prize considering the plot of most horror films is: “I was trying to go camping and this masked asshole with a chainsaw showed up and the whole weekend went down the shitter.”

This film employs a lot of clichés, as I’ve said. Apart from the mute chalk-faced black-haired ghost doing her thing we also get stuff where people look at old photos and find them distorted, and we get a creepy black fog that creeps around the house. Stuff you’ve seen before, but used to good effect. There’s also plenty of what I really like about Asian horror movies. They turn technology against the people. Most American horror films keep trying to find ways to get technology out of horror films by choosing settings where cell phones don’t work and scenes where GPS computer’s can’t find a listing for the murderous house of wax where all their friends keep getting slaughtered.

Despite all these clichés I enjoyed Cello, and thought it was better than The Red Violin (which despite starring Samuel L. Jackson didn’t stop it from being….how you say….Canadian?). I didn’t see that many movies in this genre when it was big, so that could be why these types of Asian horror movies haven’t gone stale on me yet. But there could be another reason: I am being haunted. It’s this thing called “Facebook” and it shows up everywhere I go. It’s like Invasion of the Bodysnatchers the way it’s possessing my friends. They say they need Facebook to communicate with me; when I suggest the telephone or even email they wince and squirm. Every time I open my email it has claimed another one of my friends who is urging me to join. Then the other night I woke up in this tent with all these hookers and a guy with a book strapped across his face like a mask was sitting there on a throne saying that I should “join them” and that “resistance is futile” and how Facebook “will allow me to achieve a level of poorly-spelled small talk unheard of by the inferior likes of MySpace, ICQ, and MSN.” I’m currently in talks to turn my harrowing experience into a film titled Facebook: The Murderation of Bloodified Killenings that will be remade within a year and then spawn a prequel in the distant hope that this creative venture will exorcise Facebook from my life and aid me in my quest to meet Jordana Brewster.