Labyrinth

A Load Of Trap

Labyrinth
Directed by Ryühei Kitamura
USA 2025
Screened on 29th August at FrightFest

Warning: This one has spoilers.

Okay then... so Labyrinth was my fourth and final pick from this year’s FrightFest and I chose this one because I figured it would be a gory and violent film and, it’s been a long time since I saw one of those dumb, mindless, bloodletting movies. I thought it would make a nice change from the ghost stories and high concept films I’d been watching during the rest of the festival. 

Alas, Labyrinth just reminded me of why I tend not to gravitate to these kinds of films in the first place. It kinda uses the same style of plot as the Saw films (of which I only saw the first when it came out in the cinema... although I am assawed these are actually worth a look for my blog sometime) and just gives it a slightly different method behind the madness, so to speak.

So, we have a bunch of people who we all see abducted by... I’ll call them ‘angels of death’... in an extended sequence leading up to the title card. The abducted are played by Mekhi Phifer, Alexxis Lemire, Shane West, Chris Klein, Ami Park and David Sakurai. I think that’s all of them. Anyway, they are brought to a series of rooms and corridors by a character who is, presumably, supposed to be Satan, played by Tommy Flanagan... who seems to be attempting to channel Christopher Lee a tad. And they all have to survive a series of death traps to atone for their sins.

And I’m sorry to say... it all leads up to an ending which the audience will most likely see coming. I won’t give it away here but most people will get there long before the last sequence of the movie.

Now... it’s well acted and, it is hyper gory in terms of bloody carnage... although I was hoping/expecting the goriness to be a little more innovative or pushed beyond the norm for a movie which, more or less, exists just for these kinds of bloody set pieces. It can get quite intense in places too... such as the Russian Roulette scene. And the actors are all pretty good although, honestly, if you want the audience on your side you should probably not have killed off the most charismatic personality in the cast first. 

As the film plays out, it becomes clear that the various characters have all done something bad in their past and it’s the reason why they have ended up in a labyrinth of traps. But, again, you are kind of expecting that too.

I mean, it’s a well shot production but, honestly, as I’m writing these words and realising this is going to be a really short review, I can’t think of too much more to say about the film, either good or bad. There was a lot of laughter coming at me from the right hand side of the auditorium whenever one of the specific actors opened his mouth and said something but, I can only assume that’s because some of the crew or maybe his mates were all sitting in the audience too. It’s not as though he was saying anything funny. And some people were definitely getting freaked out a little (a girl sitting next to me was having a hard time with some of the scenes) with some of the gore... although, apart from a scene where the actor I mentioned above has to cut out his vocal cords with some scissors, there’s nothing new on show here... the usual decapitations, head to toe body splittings, crucifixions etc. If you’ve seen one horror trap movie you’ve seen them all is what I was thinking about these kinds of movies as I watched... but then I remembered the brilliance of such movies as the original Cube and then think, no, it can be done well.

Sadly, for my money at least, Labyrinth is not a movie that does this particularly well. It certainly does it competently and it looks very professional... there’s just not anything innovative in terms of the story content for me and, yeah, you really will see that ending coming from a mile off. Not one I’ll visit again, for sure.

Another

Home From Home

Another
Directed by Andy Chen
USA 2026
28th August Screening at FrightFest

Okay, so my third pick from FrightFest this year was Another… and I picked this because the summary hinted that it would be a physics based journey into parallel worlds. I’ll say up front this will be a short review and I’ll also say it’s technically accomplished for a small budget piece. You usually see a fair few bad, amateurish looking films popping up at these festivals, it’s par for the course but, this year all the films I saw looked professionally put together.

All that being said, I found myself a little disappointed with this one. Yes, it does, as I’d guessed, deal with accessing parallel worlds but… and I can’t really blame the writer for this… the science of the thing is as ignored as it would be in any 50s B-movie, with a scenery chewing professor and a bunch of Ken Strickfadden gadgets back then. Which is what the film essentially is, I guess.

Now, I was really enjoying this for the first 20 minutes or so, with strong performances from India de Beaufort as a best selling writer struggling to land her second novel after losing her husband in a brutal car accident... and also from Bob Morley as said husband. These actors have you believing in the characters as people right from the get go and their efforts in this set up a nice, sturdy playing field to lay out the rest of the movie.

Unfortunately, for this audience member at least (and it may be because at this point I’m older and very jaded to this kind of thing), the film failed to bring much of anything new to the narrative and so I found myself constantly second guessing the story and, it turns out, getting it right each time. Even to the point where I could pretty much predict roughly what the last shot of the movie would be.

It doesn’t really help matters that the film does seem to be telegraphing itself so that, every time a new ‘revelation’ is made, you already figured it out ten minutes prior to that.

Now, there was one sequence I liked which did take me by surprise, featuring a creature in a door in a tree but the sting was soon taken out of this because a) that sequence turns out to be a dream in the mind of de Beaufort’s character and b) it needlessly made very blatant the obvious metaphor at the heart of the narrative, where the writer character’s fictional works are a parallel for the ‘bad science experiment’ which drives the story. So it did feel a little like the film makers were trying to beat you over the head with it by this point.

And, another short review I’m afraid but that’s me just about done with Another. The director listed Christopher Nolan as being an influence on his work during the inevitable Q & A session at the end of the screening and, I couldn’t help but think, yeah, The Prestige was a similarly obvious movie which fell into exactly the same kind of traps this one did. So, yeah, that’s that with me and this film, I think.

Salmokji - Whispering Water

Water Way To Go

Salmokji - Whispering Water
Directed by Lee Sang Min
south Korea 2026
28th August 2026 Screening at FrightFest

Okay, so after the somewhat brilliant movie Nervous (reviewed here) I returned to FrightFest the next morning for my second of this year’s films, Salmokji - Whispering Water. Which looked pretty fantastic and grossed about a gazillion pounds in its home country, knocking Project Hail Mary (still haven’t seen that) off of the top spot.

Now then, it would be true to say that this movie was mostly what I expected it to be but, sadly, not nearly as much as I’d hoped it would be.

The film starts with the brilliant premise that a road route to and in a remote forest area away from the city has had the images replaced with a ghost head staring out of the big lake. The company responsible for shooting the films and stills delete the offending image but are hit with an ultimatum by their client that new footage needs to be up by the end of the day (which, makes no sense to me because... why would you not have a back up anyway) so a new team has to go and film it.

The last team are missing and with the former director on sick leave after his experience there but, they all go down to the place and, one of the innovations of the film, if you want to call it that, is the sped up journey of the van spherised and shrunk down to a moving globe of passing footage at the centre of the screen (look, that’s the best way I can think of describing the effect… go see it if you want to see what I’m talking about).

Of course, when the crew and their producer Su In, played by Lim Hye-yoon, get there, things of an uncanny and definitely spooky nature, all focused around the lake, start to happen. And then the producer who is ill turns up and, if that doesn’t strike up a warning alarm in your brain, then you probably will quite enjoy this one. Of course, before you can say Spirit Of Dark And Lonely Water (and if you get that reference you’re probably pretty old), all watery hell breaks loose and, as many a young lady could tell you, there’s nothing light hearted about your waters breaking.

Okay, so someone whose opinion I admire greatly was exiting the screening as I left and so I asked him what he thought. His response was that it’s clichéd and, yeah, I think he really hit the nail on the head for this one (thanks Jason).

And that’s a big problem for this film, which has quite a good opening premise but then starts to very quickly pile on the expected tropes for this kind of movie. And then repeats them… and then overplays them for the rest of the movie. The problem is, for instance, that once you realise the lake can masquerade as anything plus any safe space in or out of the area… there’s not much point in rooting for any of the characters. Everyone is doomed and, I’ll charitably allow the filmmakers (who have made a pile of money out of this thing, don’t forget), that this is the main reason why the film just isn’t very scary and none of the jump scares really work either.

Honestly, Salmokji - Whispering Water plays like a very tedious, young-teen minded film and so, yeah, this reviewer is many decades removed from the target audience but, I do find it infuriating that a film which is as well lensed as this one kind of shoots itself in the foot by doing exactly what is expected of it, rather than deviating and taking a more interesting route. This one just wasn’t my cup of tea, it’s sad to say.  

Nervous

Recorded Delivery

Nervous
Directed by Abner Pastoll
2026 South Korea/United Kingdom
27th August 2026 Screening at Frightfest

It’s that time of year once again and, as always, one of the films I decided to attend at this year’s edition of FrightFest was the opening film, Nervous.

Now I’d like to say I chose this screening because the film looked really interesting (and, indeed, it did and is) but my primary motivation on this thing was, as always, to be one of the first to check out the FabPress stall for new books and US Blu Rays from the likes of Severin Films, so yeah, mission accomplished on that count.

That being said, I’m so pleased this was the opening film of the festival this year because, it was a truly great movie. After a bit of a false start that is, since the first ten minutes played without subtitles on the Korean parts of the dialogue and then, when they finally realised, they started the film off again with the proper subtitle track.

So, an Irish girl called Sarah, played by Sarah Bolger, goes to Korea with her husband Sungsoo, played by Sungsoo Yune (hmm… I sensing a trend with the character names here). They pitch up at the isolated dream house that Sungsoo’s Aunt has effectively given them but when they get there they find a mysterious intruder who leaves quickly. Also, another lady kinda joins them in friendship called Eunbyeol, who is played by none other than Ko Asung, from The Host and Snowpiercer (reviewed by me here).

But the young couple also find an old gramophone in the attic, which plays a record emitting, seemingly, silence plus weird crackling. Could it all have something to do with the outbreak of dead men and missing women which seems to have been sweeping the area?

Not long after this, Sarah stops being able to hear her husband, who just starts coming out feint and muffled on the audio track of the film. And as Sarah gets more involved with the somewhat mysterious and seductive Eunbyeol, she (and the audience) realises that it’s all men that she can’t hear, while she can hear the women-folk just fine. What’s that I hear you cry? “Not all men!” Well yeah, I think that’s kind of the point… the film does have a not so subtle, ‘me too’ feminist agenda but… it takes its chances with all the other story beats and, in this particular milieu, I didn’t think it was out of place and it's a valid point to make.

And that’s as much as I want to tell you about the plot, suffice it to say that the rogue comments about serial killers and missing women does, indeed, come into play by the end of the tale.

It’s a pretty beautiful film to start the festival off with, to be sure. Absolutely stunning cinematography and frame designs. The director likes to use big rectangular blocks of tonally variant surfaces, textures and colours to both either use as a separator for a couple of characters in a shot or, in one spectacular moment in particular, to bring his characters together in a centred, dark panel of the frame while the two outside quarters of the screen are light and used to highlight that integration of people.

And, needless to say, the film also has some excellent sound design, which, for a film that trades in crackles and muffles, it really does need to have, to be fair.

Not to mention a sequence towards the end which will have you holding on to your right ear in sympathy with what one of the characters does to themselves. It’s a slow burn but that approach more than enhances a couple of scenes which, shall we say, are not for the squeamish.

And that’s me done with this years opening FrightFest film Nervous. An absolutely beautiful film which, okay, maybe needs a more compelling title but is absolutely exquisite and, I just hope it manages to secure both a theatrical and Blu Ray release in this country, at some point soon. Maybe a label like Mubi should take a look at this one.