Film Review: Memento Mori (1999)

High school girl Min-Ah finds a diary on school grounds. She begins to read it everywhere she goes. It describes the friendship turned love affair between two of her fellow students, Hyu-Shin and Shi-Eun. While everyone else in the class acts far younger than they should, Min-Ah gets pulled into a shockingly mature and disturbing relationship. She becomes obsessed with learning everything she can about the young lovers. Even the shocking suicide of one of the girls is not enough to stop her new obsession.

Memento Mori, a spiritual successor to Whispering Corridors, strikes a very different tone. This film is all about suspense, expectations, and the blurring between reality and imagination. Min-Ah doesn't just read her classmates' shared diary; she lives it. There is no way of knowing what the truth actually is because Hyu-Shin and Shi-Eun's romance is played out like a perfect movie romance in Min-Ah's mind. The girls act very differently when they're in person. Only Min-Ah can't tell the difference.

This film is less a horror story than an almost-Gothic romance. Hyu-Shin and Shi-Eun are the most compelling characters in the film and for good reason. As over the top as their story becomes, they are at least developed beyond stereotypes. The same cannot be said for the rest of the characters in the film. From the teacher all the students have a crush on to the class clown, every other character in the film acts in the most cliched manner possible. Even Min-Ah becomes a caricature of a young woman possessed by her imagination. Despite a solid performance by Gyu-ri Kim, we never grow to actually care about Min-Ah's story. Her life becomes dedicated to to Hyu-Shin and Shi-En's story. They absorb her character. The audience is just never given anything to attach us to the actual protagonist from the beginning.

The film mostly takes on a surreal and cerebral horror style. There are flashes of strange and horrifying things the disappear as soon as they arrive. The dream-like sequences are especially compelling. Memento Mori finds its greatest strength in this absurd building of suspense. It's similar to the style of the Japanese horror film Spiral, where bland characters are pushed out of their mundane routines by shocking glimpses of otherworldly horror they cannot fight or begin to understand. The difference here is that this film would have worked better as a paranormal romance. There is no reason that a ghost story needs to be a horror film. This film was shoe-horned into the horror form just to be called a sequel to Whispering Corridors.

Despite its shortcomings, Memento Mori makes such a strong statement with the blurred reality of Hyu-Shin and Shi-Eun's relationship that its worth watching. You care about those characters' pasts even after only one is left standing. The great mystery becomes not the behavior or Min-Ah but the truth behind the doomed high school romance.