For your enjoyment, after all, it's spooky October! 🎃
Full movie: (eng sub)
The dolls for the movie were "Custom House (AI)", a now defunct company (they closed due to bad comercial management a long time before the first recast), they even had a special order for Mina and Demian, the two main BJD characters in the movie.
They weren't the coolest thing ever sculpted, but it added to the fact that you could literally have a character from the movie.
SPOILERS FROM THIS POINT ON:
This is a good movie with a moderate budget from 2004. Don't expect "Avengers Endgame", that being said, it's a good movie, but has around 3 or 4 underlying plots at the same time and things can get confusing, specially on all that's lost in translation between korean to english.
It's the type of movie you'll have to watch at least twice to get all the simultaneous plots. So if you watched the movie once and didn't got something, come back and read this post.
🎃 AGAIN, LAST CHANCE, SPOILERS FROM THIS POINT ON 🎃
I'll be telling what is going on in the order plots are introduced to the audience.
1st Plot, "the woman in red kimono":
Long ago, a guy falls in love with a woman who wears a red kimono (I know, all the movie, actors and dolls are from South Korea, but for some reason they didn't went down with traditional Korean clothing, and yes, it's a Japanese red kimono, Volks JP was still the main image for BJDs back then, and all BJDs were referred mostly as "japanese dolls", so I guess the story it's supposed to be happening in Japan?).
To prove his love to her, the guy sculpts a 1/1 scale real human sized doll from the woman as a gift to her. - The woman it's overjoyed and start dating the guy. What they didn't knew was that all the love the guy put into making the doll had gave (the doll) life of it's own, and (the doll) was inlove with the guy who created her. - So, (the doll), started hating the woman in the red kimono until one day such woman appeared dead. - No one in the village knew "who was responsible for the murder", so an angry mob blamed the guy dating her and brutally killed him. The guy was beaten to almost death and buried alive on an unmarked grave in the woods, but the doll saw it all and rested on top of the grave wishing only to be with the guy.
A LONG time passed, and a couple (an artist and her husband) found the doll in the woods. As the woman though she could restore the huge human size doll, she brought it back to an abandoned church on the woods (that they had purchased since the church was never finished and turned it into an "art museum" of sorts). - The more the woman worked on the restoration of the doll, the more this vengeful doll took over her, eventually possessing the woman's body entirely.
Now, there's a part of the plot we're not actually explained as to what happened (the woman it's now on a wheelchair and her husband has one eye white? so I guess there was a nasty fight at some point?), but the husband of the woman realized that the doll they found in the woods had possessed his wife, and thought that the only way to "free his wife soul" was to kill her; While the brother of the woman (the now "curator" of the art museum), had made a deal with the doll possessing his sister, as the doll told him she only wanted revenge for the death of the guy she loved and was murdered by the town people long-long ago, finding the real killer and making a doll at the image of the guy so the two could live forever as...a doll couple? I guess?, But that once she had killed all the descendants of the people who had murder the innocent guy all those years ago, the doll promised to leave the body of the "woman/artist/sister/wife". - So having different points of view about how to deal with the situation, the brother of the possessed woman locked up her husband in the basement in an attempt to force him to sculpt the guy-doll from an old picture; and continue to track the descendants of the original killers of the guy who was wrongly accused by the murderer of the woman in the red kimono, as well as the descendant of the actual killer. - The lure was a photoshoot reference for an artist (the woman possessed by the doll) to make new sculptures of BJDs. - Young people who have nothing to do with each other are called to the house/church/"art museum" in the woods for a weekend of pictures. And that is the point where basically the movie starts.
From this point on, we follow the story of "Park Hae-Mi" (a free spirited artist who is a bit too much of a "I don't believe in spiritual things and I'm not careful with anything), the average perv photographer, the cheerful and childish girl obsessed with western stuff, the quiet shy girl who has a doll on her own (we'll be back to that) called "Jung Young-ha", and a guy who actually wasn't invited (as the rest of the crew), called "Lee Tae-seung" who is actually a cop undercover as a model following the strange murder that had occurred in the area (also that descendant of the actual killer of the woman in the red kimono, his grandfather, a cop) - They also get introduced to all by the "curator of the art museum" (the church), called "Choi Jin-Wan", who's actually working for the spirit of the doll who possessed his sister, "the artist".
And the plot develop as expected from that point on, people appear dead, dolls move, undercover cop trying to get evidence, finally only a couple are left (the main protagonist ("Park Hae-Mi") and the (now released from the basement) husband of the woman possessed by the first doll.
2nd Plot, "Mina & Park Hae":
Mina it's first introduced as a shy girl who lives there and wears a red dress with a blouse (long white sleeves). She seems to be trying to get closer to Park Hae recalling they already knew each other, but each time gets "spooked" by someone else around and disappears. - What we later found out it's that the "human Mina" it's a physical manifestation of the spirit of a BJD that Park Hae had as a little girl.
Now, in the setting of the movie, after a human loves a doll or protects it in an act of love, a spirit might enter the doll spontaneously through their glass eyes, and the only way to stop such spirit it's to rip off the head of the doll and then destroy the eyes with something sharp. If a doll that's been manifesting as a human gets his/her/their "doll form" destroyed, they die in human and doll form equally.
Even though if Mina has been working for the evil murder doll that possessed the woman in charge of the house, Mina it's only doing it because she's been fooled to think that if she kills the others, Park Hae will be spared from death. So, while Mina does kills people in some cases, it's only because she thinks it's the only way to keep her former owner safe.
The story between Park Hae and Mina started long ago when Park was a little girl. She was gifted with a BJD (Mina), and one day, while playing in the street, a motorcycle almost run over Mina, so little Park Hae saves her at the last minute, resulting in Park getting her arm severely hurt, with a huge scar for life. In that moment, a spirit looking for love and care enters the doll (Mina), and although they seem inseparable at first, young Park Hae eventually gets tired of Mina because "it's an old doll", and toss Mina out of the window while her mom isn't watching, so Park Hae can ask for "a newer doll" (spoiled brat!).
Mina it's lost about why her human owner doesn't want her anymore, and somehow (not explained by the movie) it's found an brought to the church/art museum, where she'll later on cross paths with Park Hae again, who's now a grown up woman and doesn't even remember that she ever had a doll as a child (thing that hurts Mina's feelings, obviously).
At the end of the movie, although Mina it's mad at Park Hae for ditching her, and was convinced by the other dolls that humans deserve to die (because they'll never love their dolls), as she (Mina) prepares to attack Park Hae, sees the scar on Park's arm from the day she saved her, and turns against the "bad possessed lady doll", who ends up destroying Mina's BJD form, therefore killing her as she faints into nothingness in front of Park Hae.
3rd Plot, "Damien & Jung Young":
As doll, as human, this odd pair of what we can perceive as "siblings" have not much explained on screen time, but are pretty important to comprehend a big deal of the asian ideas about dolls being alive and humans interacting with them don't being always negative (as for western movies from Chucky to Annabelle, "all dolls are necessarily bad").
Damien (the BJD) was (as put in her words) adopted for her (Jung Young) by her father when she was little. This is an asian concept that was popularized in the western by the early 00's, as BJDs weren't seen as a purchase, but as an adoption. - Jung Young and Damien have been together for their whole life, and while all other BJDs in the house hate humans for their own reasons, Demian it's extremely possessive and caring of her human owner (although, sadly, not a match for the other dolls, as he's "killed" defending Jung Young).
During the movie we see Jung Young apparently "hearing" Damien "talk to her" about information she couldn't have known beforehand (like Mina and Park past), and, felling something was not right from the start (and this might be the reason why the other dolls disposed of him). - Although Jung it's seen as "odd" and "shy" (or "extra obsessive careful"), her behavior it's seen as the definition of the ""crazy doll lady"" by the other characters. We must remember that her strong bonding to Damien allowed her to know she (and everyone) were in danger since they arrived at the church/house/art museum. Therefore I really get poor Jung Young trying to get others from shaking Damien like a pillow, or sitting on top of him, and at the same time knowing they're in danger. - There's even a scene where Park Hae "sits" on a bed, hurting a bit Damien legs, although Jung reacts fast. Later on, other dolls in the room attack Jung mentally until she gets a seizure and falls down to the floor, Park sees Damien and pick him up to place him with his (still unconscious) owner, but Damien returns the "you sit on me!" favor by pinching Park in the hand, therefore giving an idea of how intelligent and what sort of personality Demian has when he (or his human) gets wronged.
This might be my favorite two characters from all the movie, and I do feel bad for them. 🥺
🎃 There's a couple more plots, but this are the ones you need to get in order to understand the situation presented in the movie, that ends in the idea of how disposable things are for people, and what might happen if those things had fellings for us, like a twisted version of ToyStory but with BJDs.
