The Guard Post (2008)

GPSOG?

Director  Kong Su-chang

Stars Kyoo-Hwan Choi, Ho-jin Chun, Byeong-Cheol Do & Cho Hyun-jae

Country South Korea

Things you might like

• Chilling, well constructed horror
• Intriguing and engaging mystery
• Grounding and subtle lead performance
• Entertaining until the end

Things you might not like

• A touch too much plotting
• Feeling confused
• Pretty downbeat

Conclusion
The Guard Post is an edgy and well measured horror.  Slow burning and intriguingly twisting, you’ll scratch your head as often as you’ll scream.

3 out of 5 Unsightly Rashes

Luke McGrath

***

There’s always a temptation to rally against genre and classification in film criticism; it can be stifling, misleading and plain wrong.  Yet it also helps fans find new favourites, marketers find poster quotes and gives film geeks another way of categorising their collections.  K-horror stands between the two and The Guard Post gains as much as it loses from the tag.  It is a chilling film, full of shocks and psychological twists, but is in many ways much more than that.

Explaining the story of this film would take more words than I have at my disposal, and probably in my vocabulary.  The Wikipedia page contains one of the longest plot synopses I’ve ever come across, and it’s not something I’m willing to recreate here. The bare bones of the plot are what’s really important (though you might want to read that sysnopsis after you’re done to check you were following).  To that end, South Korean soldiers are called in when one of the guard posts in the demilitarized zone goes silent.  They find two survivors, one apparently having killed the rest of the inhabitants.  The incoming soldiers have until the morning to uncover the mystery and avoid succumbing to the same fate.

While we’re on the subject then, the plot is more than a stretch to understand.  It deepens and widens the longer it goes on and begins to overlap with itself too much in the final third.  Much of what goes on is revealed to make sense but you always feel a little uncomfortable explaining what’s going on in case you’re getting it all backwards.  Some films can get away with that, Memento and Mulholland Dr. do it well, but this otherwise tight horror doesn’t need it.

Elsewhere, the atmosphere is perfectly and chillingly pitched from the moment we follow a troop of soldiers into the barracks where the first set of murdered bodies are piled up.  There is madness in the air; a bare chested soldier smiles at the incoming soldiers while across the country two old friends attend a funeral.  Uncertainty pervades the action more effectively than it does the story; victims seem interchangeable with their attackers and flashbacks are mirrored in the present.  And of course it rains like hell.

Central to the development of the mood is the leading performance of Ho-jin Chun as the old soldier investigating the guard post.  His patient inquiries dictate the pace of the film, a slow burn but never a moment of lethargy.  We understand as he does, never knowing more but rarely knowing less.  His fears are our fears, just as much afraid of uncovering the mystery as never finding out what happened.  He is our route to the horror, grounding the film with an earthy realism that pulls an outlandish idea into reality.

In the end, K-horror is as K-horror does.  This is a Korean horror film, made with many of the same devices that define the genre.  It has shocks, it has gore and it has a psychological edge that the vanilla offerings of Hollywood rarely match.  Yet The Guard Post is a crisply filmed and subtly acted mystery too.  K-horror-plus if we absolutely must, a synonym for great filmaking.

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