Product Description

Deep in the forest, a man and woman have been brutally attacked in a cabin and left to die. Arriving too late, Kang chases the killer only to be hit by a speeding car. Barely surviving surgery, he now finds himself a prime suspect. He cannot shake the feeling that there are strange gaps in his memory regarding that night and the killer's identity. While police set out to confirm his story, he begins his own quest to remember the truth about the murder and himself.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #36892 in DVD
• Released on: 2005-10-25
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: AC-3, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DTS Surround Sound, DVD, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: Korean
• Subtitled in: English, Spanish
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 120 minutes

Customer Reviews

Remarkably Symbolic and Entangled Mystery Tale...
Spider Forest illustrates a twisted narrative that flutters with total freedom in several unexpected directions. Nothing is absolute in this tale, as the story applies flashbacks, time loops, and converging timelines. Past and future unite in the present while emotions color the moment in a unification of a cerebral mesh of dreams, thoughts, and feelings. Such promise surfaces in the opening shot where the camera zooms through a window on a mysterious character's back while staring out into a dark forest. Yet, the series of events follow a logically linear outline that surrounds a murder mystery in a haunted location. With this said, be warned, and do not take your eyes off the screen, as it might leave you lost in a cerebral maze.

A nightly excursion brings the protagonist, Kang Min (Woo-seong Kam), to a thick forest where he awakens in dirt and blood while trying to recapture his bearings. Simultaneously, the shadows playfully create imaginative characters among the vast number of bamboo trees that surrounds him. Stumbling, Min discovers an isolated cabin within the forest, which he approaches with watchful eyes. Min enters the cabin where he finds a severely lacerated male body, which shows signs of vicious struggle. In the adjacent room, he uncovers a young woman who holds onto life on a thin thread, which is no other than his own girlfriend. Alas, she dies in his arms, as he hears a strange noise from somewhere within the wood cottage. Vigilantly, Min investigates the sound, as he reveals that the killer is still on the premises. A short chase through the murky forest ends up with him being struck into unconsciousness once again.

Lightheaded and aimlessly Min awakens a second time while wandering into a lit tunnel. Inside the tunnel, he stops when he notices someone observing him. However, he is still too faint to make out who it is, and it distracts his limited attention to the dangers that lurk on the highways. And again Min ends up in a state of deep sleep induced by an accident from which he does not wake up from until medical doctors have attended to his severe head trauma. Min is left with his grave head injuries, as he slowly regains some foothold in reality and can alarm the police about the murders in the wood cabin.

Through intriguing flashbacks the story begins to unfold, as Min shares his faulty memory of the nightly excursion and his discovery of the murders. The flashbacks reveal that Min visited the forest due to an assignment to investigate some haunted circumstances of the forest. He also shares how he lost an old girl friend to a plane crash while information is exposed of an old murder that took place some twenty years ago in the woods. As the story goes on, the story becomes increasingly muddled, maybe it is the ghost of the forest that haunts him, or maybe it is simply his head injury that makes it difficult for Min to make out what is truth and what is fiction. Perhaps there is another reason that is waiting to be brought into daylight. Nonetheless, the truth does not reveal itself until the very final scene, and it keeps the viewer in thrilling suspense.

The story uses, as mentioned, a tangled storyline that expects to be untangled by the viewer through Min's slowly returning memory. It is a shrewd approach to the story that the director and writer Il-gon Song apply, as it forces the viewer to be as preoccupied with the truth as Min. At the same time, Song employs subtle clues and diversion that keeps the suspense lingering while the constant feeling of wickedness never leaves the mind. However, there are momentarily symbolic clues that seem to seep through Min's damage mind, which surface through inspiring scenes, framing and mise-en-scene. To capture these brief moments, the audience must, as previously warned, pay close attention to all aspects of this remarkable mystery tale.

Like a strange dream...
I came across this one day and was lucky enough to decide to pick it up.

The beginning: a scene with a woman in the middle of a forest with snow falling all around, is very powerful, and so are most of the moments in this film. At times the story is strange, weird, beautiful, and confusing. The music creates a great backdrop to the events unfolding as a man with amnesia experiences eerie happenings in his search for the truth.

Watching Spider Forest is like watching a strange and slightly disturbing dream taking place while awake. Every moment you're trying to figure out just what happened as the story unfolds, and it is done incredibly well. The events are all extremely bizarre, the filming is excellent, colors create a great atmosphere; altogether, a very, very good film.

I love this movie. I am so proud of the director of this and was very impressed. Even watching it a second time, the feel of this movie didn't go away, and I thought about it days after. So original...I can't say enough about it.
One warning though: this does contain some explicit scenes (I don't want to have to say what; hopefully you get my drift). I do not like the specific ones I am talking about; things like that are better left unseen. The R-rating is valid, so if you don't like seeing those things either avoid this or fast forward.

What "Tale of Two Sisters" tried - and failed - to be: Brilliant
[N.B. - Contains thinly-veiled spoilers! Beware!]


I'm sitting here trying to think of what to say about this movie and what I'm getting is a stream of adjectives... Bewildering; brutal; heart-wrenching; astonishing; baffling; mind-bending; ingenious; perplexing; poetic...

And that's weird because when I'd finished watching (about an hour ago,) it was something I hadn't decided whether to love or hate. Thankfully, with some serious thought and a vital clue I got from somebody else, I was able to unravel my confusion, clear away some of the, er, cobwebs, and discard the latter option. Or maybe I'm just dense. 8^D "Spider Forest" is a truly remarkable story and an unexpected gem of a psychological mystery-thriller - that just happens to elevate "thought-provoking" to the "rip out your hair" level. I can't wait to dive into a second helping.

There are a dozen utterly perplexing paradoxes in this story, the most significant of which involves the intentional confusion of the protagonist's character with another, creating an inescapable time-loop - which left me shaking my head and talking to the screen like a lunatic. A similar paradox involving a different major character had me hitting pause - so as to ponder the implications of it all. When I resumed, it soon became evident that these complex twists and turns were to be regular occurrences. But unlike... another recent Korean thriller, in "Spider Forest" the wrenching, mind-blowing plot twists had a definite, calculated, and most importantly, logical purpose: To weave an intricate puzzle around one solid, definite final truth whose eventual revelation unfolds with the elegance and dramatic impact of a symphony. Remember how the UFO tune "Love to Love" ends? Schenker's heady, stratospheric crescendo that finally - and abruptly - crashes to Earth with a finality that leaves you physically shaken? The ending of "Spider Forest" is a lot like that, one of the most artful finishes of a film I've seen since the final seconds of "Blood Simple" (yet completely unlike it.)

The mood is as relentless and emotionally edgy as that of the Mickey Roarke film "Prayer for the Dying"; the photography is dark and atmospheric without being either contrived or openly depressing; the acting is great all around; the supernatural tinges are understated enough to allow the film to be classified as a completely non-supernatural mystery, yet serve to tie the story threads together comfortably and seamlessly - something that would likely have been botched in the hands of a lesser writer/director.

The real star of the show is of course the story itself. It's a brilliant, circular thing that reminds me of Pink Floyd's "Wall" or maybe just that circular, intertwined knot on the cover of King Crimson's classic "Discipline." As it progresses you're kept in a constant state of agitation - that gnawing feeling that there's something vital you've missed (and in fact you will have,) something you can almost get a handle on but not quite - just as the next tidbit of knowledge passes before you, then quickly flits away before you can get a grasp of it. The overall effect is to leave you in something of a daze - not a daze of disgust for a puzzle that's insoluble by design (like... another recent Korean thriller,) but rather the healthy agitation of grappling with a worthy challenge to your intellect.

That, folks, is great storytelling.