Movies
Voice (V)
“It’s also a fitting and classy closing to a production that rises above the clichés that generally riddle the Asian market—a truly interesting project that is totally worth checking out even if you’ve never seen any of the other GHOST SCHOOL films.”
It’s been a decade since the film WHISPERING CORRIDORS was released in Korea and several years, since the DVD release of that film and its two companion projects MOMENTO MORI and WISHING STAIRS made their debuts here in the U.S. Last year when Tartan Asia Extreme re-released the films in a GHOST SCHOOL TRILOGY box set, they neglected to mention that a fourth film in the series had been shot in 2005. That film, YEOGO GWAE-DAM 4: MOKSORI arrives on DVD Stateside from Genius Entertainment under the much more manageable title VOICE.
Like the other films in the “GHOST SCHOOL TRILOGY” VOICE only shares the most basic of plot descriptors—those being, the setting; an all-girls school, and the overall focus; a ghost story. How each film uses those broad brushstrokes to paint their celluloid picture is what makes them unique. This time however, the film seems to be combining major and minor plot points from the previous three incarnations to manufacture the latest supernatural horror story.
The basis of the story is one of friendship. Young-eon (Kim Ok-bin, ARANG) is your average high school girl with one amazing gift—her beautiful singing voice. Her best friend is Sun-min (Seo Ji-hyu). As the film opens, Young-eon is rehearsing late into the evening on campus. After Sun-min heads home for the night, Young-eon is killed by a vengeful spirit. The next morning Young-eon awakens—apparently alive—in the music room having seemingly spent the night at the school. But, once she ventures out into the bustling halls, she discovers the horrible truth about her fate. Desperate to communicate with anyone that she is still there, Young-eon discovers that Sun-min can still hear her. When Sun-min finally accepts that she’s not insane and that the voices in her head are real, the pair set out to unravel who killed Young-eon and why.
For a ghost story, and a horror film to boot, VOICE is essentially nothing more than a murder mystery, and one that has to be solved by the actual victim. The suspects are abundant, with suspicions falling on the music teacher (Kim Seo-hyeong, BLACK HOUSE) who lost her voice due to throat cancer, the new student who just returned from the nuthouse (Cha Ye-ryeon) or perhaps even a vengeful spirit of another promising teenage soprano who committed suicide in the schools elevator (Lim Hyeon-kyeong). The film successfully balances these questions dutifully doling out tidbits of information and misinformation through flashback sequences. The film also introduces a few interesting ideas about life after death—including that the spirits can visit their memories through a kind of temporal vortex and that the spirit is only held to this plane of existence as long as someone here remembers them. It’s this final caveat that makes the relationship between Young-eon and Sun-min so compelling and it’s also what sets the film apart in terms of tone—making it more of a drama than your standard Asian Horror film.
Unlike so many of it’s J and K-horror brethren, VOICE is also—for all it’s flashbacks—an incredibly linear film that isn’t the least bit difficult to follow…up to a point. It seems that Director Choe Ik-hwan decided at the last minute—where he’s going for the big resolve—to inundate the audience with far too many ideas about what transpired over the course of the film. It makes matters even more complex in that the exposition occurs between mirror images of the Young-eon characters. So, essentially she’s telling herself what happened but from the point of view of a different character. To say this dénouement requires that you put down your popcorn and pick up your brain power would be an understatement. Also, at 104-minutes VOICE is the longest film in the series other than the original and it sometimes feels every minute of it. Still, these flaws don’t distract too badly (assuming you “get” the conclusion) from the overall production making it one of the strongest entries of the set.
Finally, the film wraps up with the most melancholy closing credit sequences I’ve ever seen in an Asian Horror film and perhaps in a Western one too—really driving home the isolationism of the lost spirits in the story. In fact, for lack of a better term one could say it’s haunting. It’s also a fitting and classy closing to a production that rises above the clichés that generally riddle the Asian market—a truly interesting project that is totally worth checking out even if you’ve never seen any of the other GHOST SCHOOL films.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Daniel Kraus took the literary world by storm back in 2023 with the release of his hit novel Whalefall. A terrifying yet intimate survival thriller with mythological undertones, the book was almost immediately bombarded with offers from movie studios wanting to adapt its claustrophobic imagery to the big screen.
Fast forward to June of 2026, and we finally got our first glimpse at Brian Duffield’s long-awaited adaptation of Whalefall, starring Austin Abrams as our unfortunate lead who gets swallowed alive by a sperm whale. While this two-and-a-half-minute teaser only covers the beginning of the story, it’s already been making waves online (and in-person at select 4DX promotional screenings) as one of the most stressful cinematic experiences of the year.
In fact, my own wife had to cover her eyes and exclaim, “You’re definitely not dragging me to watch this one” when we saw the whale’s jaws begin to close in on Abrams, with this incident alone already leaving me convinced that this will likely be one of the biggest genre hits of the year. With that in mind, I’d like to invite you to take a closer look at the teaser in order to break down interesting details and get a better idea of what’s in store for genre fans when the movie finally comes out this October.
Of course, as usual, don’t forget to comment below if you noticed something we didn’t!
Now, without further ado, here are five things we learned from the Whalefall trailer!
5. Austin Abrams Performed Many of His Own Stunts
Much like in his previous film, No One Will Save You, Duffield insisted that this visceral experience should be grounded by our main character’s believable reactions, regardless of the plot’s effects-heavy setup. That’s why the camera always makes sure to linger on Abrams through his diving mask, so we know that it’s really him going through this ordeal alongside the audience.
While plenty of CGI was used in order to bring this larger-than-life story to the big screen without killing our leading man, Abrams apparently insisted on performing many of his underwater stunts himself (several of which are visible in the trailer) – much to the chagrin of a worried Duffield and the flick’s stunt coordinator, Shauna Duggins.
4. The Film Seamlessly Transitions Between the California Coast and Underwater Sets
Duffield obviously wasn’t about to drag his crew out to the middle of the ocean and shoot inside a real sperm whale, but it’s reassuring to see the filmmaker blend on-location footage with the underwater tank segments and the literal belly of the whale set.
There may be plenty of CGI stitching these elements together, but the trailer shows us that only the truly impossible shots are completely digital, meaning that the filmmakers didn’t take the easy way out when it came to adapting this unique story.
3. The Whale is Only Part of the Story
Book adaptations tend to leave out inner monologues and the occasional flashback in order to streamline the narrative (which is one reason why it’s so difficult to translate Stephen King novels to the big screen), but a claustrophobic parable like Kraus’ Whalefall would get a bit dull after a while if the whole thing was entirely set within the creature’s stomach.
That’s why it’s such a relief that the trailer hints at how Duffield will also be adapting many of the book’s introspective moments chronicling our protagonist’s harsh upbringing under his troubled father. Not only do these inclusions give the audience some much-appreciated breathing room, but they also give Josh Brolin a chance to shine as a truly complicated character.
2. The Movie is Keeping the Book’s Scientific Accuracy…
While Kraus’ novel was inspired by a viral video of kayakers nearly being swallowed by a humpback whale, the writer ended up consulting with marine biologists about exactly what kind of situation might lead to a whale actually eating a human being alive.
The answer was surprisingly specific, as cetaceans are almost universally known to be friendly towards humans. However, even a gentle giant can make mistakes, and as we see in the trailer, Abrams’ unpleasant fate is more of an accident than anything else – with the massive sperm whale only trapping the poor diver in the first (and thankfully acid-free) chamber of its stomach due to a mix-up involving a giant squid.
Fortunately for the film’s special effects artists, they can now reference the first-ever footage of a real-life sperm whale chowing down on one such squid, as this freaky recording was released late last year.
1. …With a Catch!
Duffield may be doing his best to recreate the grounded (or is it submerged?) thrills of Kraus’ novel, but there are limits to what can be depicted onscreen while still guaranteeing an entertaining movie. That’s why it’s no surprise that Whalefall will take advantage of certain cinematic parlor tricks as the director tests the limits of both physics and biology so we can actually watch his movie.
For starters, the innards of the whale itself have been greatly exaggerated so there’s enough space to make out the action, and in the spirit of movies like Neil Marshall’s The Descent, there also seems to be plenty of non-diegetic lighting meant to show us what’s going on even if Abram’s character wouldn’t necessarily be able to see anything.
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