Lee Hyeon-Min (Hyeon-jun Shin) is ready to quit his job. His daughter has recently gone through a heart transplant, and still isn't doing the best. He wants to quit in order to have more time to help take care of her, but the doctor that did the surgery isn't being very straight forward with Lee about it. Every time Lee asks about the donor, the doctor gives him the run around. Lee's job is that of forensic face reconstruction. He takes the skulls of unknown victims and tries to give them a face again. His boss tries hard to talk him out of quiting, but Lee goes home and gets ready to pack his things up. Jeong Seon-yeong (Yun-ah Song) shows up that night with a skull. Lee refuses to do anything with it, but Jeong leaves it with him. After seeing some strange things, and hearing a weird ringing noise, Lee soon changes his mind. Will he be able to help Jeong and the victim?
Face is a bit of an odd movie in that it doesn't feel much like a horror film even though the ghost try to be scary looking. Director Sang-Gon Yoo combines forensic science with different types of ghosts. I'm in the same field, but I do different things, and have yet to come across a ghost. Then again, I'm not in a movie. The ghosts that we do find mostly here are what reminded me of the ghosts from Grudge. Not so much in the way they moved, but just in their general look. Hair that seems to be alive and blood shot eyes. I thought it was kind of a silly way to get Lee to work on the skull. Like most movies today, there is a twist at the end of the movie. The twist was easy to see coming for a couple of different reasons. The twist itself makes the other ghosts unneeded and pointless.
The story itself was a little interesting for me since it had to do with forensics. I have never done this type, and more than likely never will, but still nice to see it in a horror movie. There is also some police trying to link the connection between missing people and a doctor who seems to be able to provide hearts for a certain kind of transplant person. Organs are like blood in that a certain type can give to any other type, but can only receive the same type. Because of this story line running side by side with Lee doing his thing, it isn't hard at all to see where things are going. The twist mixes it up a little bit, but as I said, even that is easy to see coming.
At the start of Face there is a pretty good gory effect of someone having their heart taken out. This is a good start, but as it turned out it was the only gory effect to be found. Hate it when they tease like that. The acting was about the same way. No one stood out to me, but the acting wasn't bad at all. The leads were fine, if a bit too serious all the time. I guess the character of Lee has every reason to be serious though with everything is going through.
While I enjoyed the nod to forensics, I found that Face could have been a whole lot better. For me the main problem was that it was just too easy to connect the dots and figure out what was going to happen way in advance. I suppose that the ghosts did help with breaking up the slowness, even though it wasn't that bad. It would have been nice if the ghosts had been used to advance the plot a little more, added more to the story as well. I didn't find Face to be a bad film really, just way too predictable. Maybe worth a watch once, but I know I won't be going back to it anytime soon.
2 out of 5 Not an artist so would never try what Lee does
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