As is often stated in this picture, those who believe may yet be saved. Issues of blind faith and spritual possession are carefully explored in this impressive directorial debut that manages to disturb without resorting to excessive gore, the unstable atmosphere brought to life through its strange characters and ambiguous reality in which the fantastic approach is rather consistently maintained, the actual presence of supernatural forces never conclusively proven. The trouble begins when college student Hee-jin (Sang-mi Nam) gets a phone call in the middle of the night from her 13 year-old sister So-jin (Shim Eun-kyung) asking her if she's alright before suddenly hanging up. Hee-jin's confusion deepens the next morning when she learns through her mother that So-jin as disappeared, prompting her to leave school and go back home to face her fanatically religious mother and search for her sister. Sometimes aided by a detective (Seung-yong Ryoo), Hee-jin learns through recalled accounts of various tenents from her mom's appartment building that So-jin was widely acknowledged to be spritually possessed, the strangeness of which is amplified as a string of suspicious-looking suicides begin just after her disappearance. Part mystery, part ghost-story, Possessed can perhaps best be summed up through a literal translation of its original title, Bool-sin-ji-ok, which means 'Hell of the non-believers', Hee-jin's lack of faith making her stranger in hell, embodied by the appartment building that becomes a character in itself, its residents exploitative zealots that give faith a bad name. While sometimes stagnant and a bit slow, Possessed is crafty in making the audience, much like Hee-jin, doubt their own sanity in this quest to find out who's on the level or not.
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