Director Su-chang Kong re-enters R-Point territory with this impressive shocker…
When communications fall silent from a guard post in the Demilitarised Zone between North and South Korea, a platoon headed by Sergeant Major Seong-gyu Noh (Cheon Ho-Jin, A Dirty Carnival) is sent in to investigate. What they find is a massacre of the twenty-strong squad stationed there, the only survivor is Lieutenant Yoo Jeong Woo (Cho Hyun-Jae, Scandal), the son of a high-ranking chief in the military – making this a potential political nightmare to boot.
Noh only has until the morning to find out what really happened before his superiors order a cover-up of the whole situation, but as he begins sorting through the clues it soon becomes apparent that Yoo knows much more than he’s letting on. A events start to repeat themselves, can Noh find the truth before the same fate befalls his team?
In a relatively short body of work writer/director Su-chang Kong has built up a solid reputation for intelligent horror/thriller. His script for Tell Me Something made all the right moves, and his directorial debut R-Point was critically acclaimed and at one point rumoured to be remade in the West by Zhang Yimou (a somewhat unlikely pairing that never came to fruition). Now The Guard Post follows very much in that mould, but with a plotline revolving around remote stationed Army squad, is it a little too close to R-Point?
Never playing for cheap thrills, the film impressively builds up the paranoia of the squads’ remote location against Noh efforts to find the truth. Relying on an atmosphere of distrust and fear to build tension, rather than gore and full-blown horror. In many respects, it’s a direct cross between John Carpenter’s The Thing and Park Chan-wook’s Joint Security Area (JSA), even following a similar narrative to the latter as Noh’s investigation slowly uncovers the truth. The acting is superb, as Su-chang’s script makes real, if somewhat flawed characters out of the soldiers concerned.
Towards the last half Su-chang’s film goes awry. The solution starts to play out like one of those old episodes of The X Files where Mulder and Scully get holed up in a remote station with some odd bunch of odd characters. (It doesn’t really matter which one – they did quite a few.) Not that that in itself is necessarily a bad thing, but the continual retelling of the events from different accounts, more in the style of Usual Suspects than Kurosawa’s Rashômon, eventually starts to grate. And the conclusion, involving a paranoia driven shoot-out, seems to rob the film of some of the power it held before.
Overall this is a worthy horror, if not quite as outstanding as R-Point – I for one would just like to see Su-chang pick a very different subject matter next time.
The Guard Post is released on DVD Monday 13 October by Cine Asia.
DVD details
Distributor: Cine Asia (UK)
Solid master of the film keeps the detail in a predominantly dark movie, with good sound quality.
There's also a host of extras on this edition, from featurettes about the making of the film, special effects and set design, to storyboards and trailers.
