Spider Forest

Spider Forest is a 2004 South Korean horror drama written and directed by Song Il gon.

Awaking alone in the middle of a dark forest, Kang Min sees a secluded cabin nearby and wanders towards it. Upon entering the small home, he is shocked to discover a brutal, bloody crime had taken place. A man, hacked repeatedly by a sickle, lies on the floor, dead. Min hears a noise nearby and discovers his girlfriend Su Young, stabbed and nearly dead, stammering something about "spiders." Before he could save his loved one, Min is caught off guard by the killer who unexpectedly emerges and dashes out of the cabin. Min grabs the sickle and pursues the dark figure through the shadowy woods of the Spider Forest, only to be temporarily knocked out with a blunt blow to the face. Min, being disoriented and slightly dazed, sees the killer enter into a tunnel on a road nearby and stumbles after him. Yet upon entering the tunnel, a speeding SUV collides with Min and throws him to the ground, severely injured by the impact. As he lies on the pavement with his blood streaming across the ground, the dark figure approaches Min and stands mere inches away, as if mocking his inability to capture him. Min extends his arm, desperately trying to grab him, but in vain and he soon loses consciousness

Min wakes up fourteen days later at a local hospital with his head heavily bandaged. His friend, a police detective named Choi, is at his bedside to both comfort and question him about the murders. Min discovers that he, in fact, is the prime suspect of the killings due to his fingerprints being on the sickle that he picked up and his relationship with the victims. Choi, wanting to believe in his friend's innocence, asks Min to tell him everything that had happened leading up to the brutal crime. Weaving in and out of consciousness, Min tries to reconstruct the bizarre events, but it proves to be a too difficult task. Min finds that there are some details he cannot remember, while other details he can't even be sure they actually happened. The boundary between dreams and reality become blurred as he tries to piece together his enigmatic past in an effort to complete a puzzle that will, hopefully, prove his innocence

Writer/director Song had originally written a script that thoroughly explained the mystery driving the plot, then deliberately removed as much of that explanation as he thought he could get away with. His storytelling method is very much from the European arthouse mode: he leaves the answers, the interpretation, up to the audience.

The film's short domestic run received scant attention from local critics. The Dong A Daily News describes the film as "an unusual movie that drives audiences to solve a puzzle that never ends [It] belongs to the mystery thriller genre, but its sophisticated editing makes the movie devoid of fast story development, the major feature of a mystery thriller."

Due to distribution on multiple film festival circuits (not to mention an extensive release on DVD by Tartan Video), the film received more attention from international critics than it received from its own country. Eye Weekly, which reviewed the film at The International Toronto Film Festival, referred to the film as a "supernatural thriller" with "a dark look, a genuinely puzzling (and engrossing) set up, and a couple of memorable ghostly passages." However, it asks in a condescending manner, "Why can't it make even a lick of sense?" Twitch also reviewed the film at The International Toronto Film Festival, describing it as "well written, well executed and well shot," but concludes by stating, "the film as a whole somehow ends up being slightly less than the sum of its parts."