Memento Mori

Title - Memento Mori (Ghost school 2 or Whispering Corridors 2)
Language -  Korean
Genre - Horror, ghost

Memento Mori is the second film in the ghost school series of films, the first being Whispering Corridors but, like all the films in the series, it is not a sequel.  It has the same setting of an all girls school, it focuses on the relationships between some of the students  and teachers and there’s a ghost but it is a different tale with new characters.

Memento Mori was a hard film film to follow as it it is not linear, the story follows events that happen in the present but is also interspersed with flashbacks.  The main problem with this is that it was hard to tell when it switch from one to the other.

The film starts with Min-Ah, one of the students at the school who seems to be obsessed with a diary she is reading.  The diary was written by two other students, Hyo-shin and Shi-Eun and most of the film follows their relationship both through flashbacks of Min-Ah (and later Shi-Eun) reading the diary and of what is happening in the present.

Memento Mori starts by setting what the school life is like, the classes are chaotic and the girls all have their own groups of friends, the teachers have trouble keeping the classes under control.  Min-ah has a group of friends but she seems to be drawn to the diary and after Hyo-Shin’’s death she seems to  become increasingly obsessed with Shi-Eun.

While Min-Ah has the diary we follow Shi-Eun & Hyo-Shin’s from their getting together through their coming out and touching on the events that lead to them breaking up and when Shi-Eun is reading the diary we see more about their breakup and the events leading to Hyo-Shin’s death.  It is during the time Hyo-Shin is reading the diary that the ghost is most active and Min-Ah’s obsession seems at it’s strongest.

I found the flow of Memento Mori hard going, half the story is told through flashbacks but there didn’t seem much to say when it was a flashback of the present.  The film not only jumps from past to present without any warning but the flashbacks are not in order for example the scenes in the hospital is split up over a couple of flashbacks which are between other flashbacks.  I think it is done to slowly reveal the past events of the main two characters but, at times it just makes the film a bit of a jumble.

A small part of the film does make sense and that is when the ghost first starts to manifest.  The ghost starts to haunt Min-Ah and even tells her that she wants the return of her diary but by the end of the film the diary is not mentioned.  The ghost does go away at the same time as the diary goes missing but it is never shown that this is why the ghost leaves.

Another thing that can make the film hard to follow, especially at the end is the telepathy that is first shared between Hyo-Shin & Shi-Eun and then later between Shi-Eun and Min-Ah.  I think part of the problem I had with this was due to me using subtitles, there is a lot going on at the end of the film  so when two characters are talking without a lot of the normal visual cues and time taken from looking at the action to read the text it can cause extra problems.  The telepathy itself is an interesting plot device, I've read a few different views on what it means but, at least on a basic leave it seems to symbolize the state of the relationship between Shi-Eun & Hyo-Shin and then later Shi-Eun & Min-Ah.  The telepathic link is strongest between the couple(s) at the beginning of the relationship but, as Hyo-Shin and Shi-Eun drift apart the link is used less and less and then is used again between Shi-Eun and Min-Ah at the end of the film as their relationship starts.

The one thing Memento Mori does do right (in my opinion) is how it handles the romantic relationships.  There are a couple of times that Memento Mori could have fall back on using sex scenes either to help move the plot along or just because there is an opportunity there to do it but it doesn’t.  The fact that we see any kind of sex helps keep the story more emotional and, for one part of the plot helps to keep a bit of the mystery, we never know if Hyo-shin is pregnant.

There are a couple of plot line that seems to go nowhere.  At the start of the film there is a scene with two girls tied up by the leg in the swimming pool but this is never mentioned.  In the film  At the beginning of the film  and part way through it is mentioned that there may be a curse on the school and that five people have already died and that one more person (after Hyo-Shin) needs to die to lift the curse but nothing is made of this, we do not find out about any other deaths.  We do see one other character dead and there are some theories that Shi-Eun died at the end but none of this is ever linked back to the curse.  I do think that the theory about Shi-Eun being dead at the end is not true, if any of the girls are dead then it would most likely be Min-Ah because of the dream like sequence we see whilst the school is locked upped, but this doesn't make any sense to any of the relationships in the film so I don’t believe she died.

For all its faults Memento Mori has a good story and is an interesting film but it isn't an easy watch you need time and patience to work out what is happening when and you probably need to see it more than once.