Hyo-shin (Yeh-jin Park) and
Shi-eun (Young-jin Lee) are two girls in love in a Korean high school. They share
a journal together, taking turns writing in it, and can even communicate with
telepathy. But there is talk of suicide after a very public display of affection
and difficulty with other students leads to some wariness on Hyo-shin's part.
Eventually, one jumps from the roof of the school ... or was she helped to her
death? Then things get freakier. Fellow student Min-ah (Min-sun Kim) finds
the journal and begins to see visions and hear things. A friend accuses her of
dating Shi-eun. Is everyone who reads the diary bound to die? For the most
part, the film is a confusing mishmash of images, dialog and overly dramatic music
in a non-linear timeline. Midway through the story of teenage girls, it turns
into a horror movie with ghostly images of the lovers, but returns to flashbacks
of the two when they were alive. Then back to the horror movie again for the end,
with heavy doses of annoying teenage girls who do know how to scream. Regardless
of its entrance into the horror genre, Memento Mori fits squarely into
the tragic lesbian love story in which one of the lovers must die out of shame.
|