South Korean film “The Hand”, which is incidentally the last movie I happened to watch as a judge for one certain minor category of the upcoming Wildflower Film Awards ceremony of this year, starts with a supposedly intriguing horror story premise, but, to my big disappointment, it does not have much time or skill to develop that into something truly tense or frightening. Despite its rather short running time (58 minutes), the movie often feels like a short film extended too long, and this made me more aware of its many glaring flaws including its deficient storytelling and shallow characterization.

The movie is basically one extended situation unfolded inside a very limited space. After having a strange dream probably due to another night of heavy drinking, Bong-soo (Lea Jae-won) wakes up and then goes to the bathroom inside his apartment, but then he is caught off guard as encountering something very disturbing in the bathroom. For no apparent reason, a mysterious hand is being erected right from the inside of the toilet in the bathroom, and he is not hallucinating at all because his wife also sees the same thing after being awakened by him.

Quite baffled and disturbed, Bong-soo naturally makes an emergency call. He is subsequently told that a paramedic team will soon come to his apartment, but, of course, things quickly get weirder for Bong-soo and his wife. They are relieved to see the security guy of their apartment building coming to their apartment, but something scary happens to the security guy right before the paramedic team eventually arrives, and, what do you know, they and several others find themselves somehow locked inside the bathroom.

It becomes more evident to us that whatever is going on around them is clearly involved with that hand, but it takes some more time for them to grasp their increasingly risky circumstance. Some of them eventually do some idiotic things just like many other horror movie characters, and then, not so surprisingly, they all belatedly come to realize how evil and dangerous that hand really is.

Now this looks like a fairy good setup, but the screenplay by director Choi Yun-ho and his co-writer Jangjak, who has been known for several online graphic novels, does not advance much from that. For instance, it does not provide much explanation on that hand at all, and it is also rather vague about how the hell that hand ended up being in the bathroom of Bong-soo’s apartment. Later in the story, the lead of the paramedic team reveals one certain weird incident which occurred some time ago in Bong-soo’s neighborhood, but, to our frustration, the movie never makes any clear connection between that incident and the origin of that hand, and we come to observe the whole situation without much care or interest.

I guess the movie tries to generate more horror and terror from the chaos and confusion among its several main characters including Bong-soo, but, unfortunately, none of them is particularly developed well enough to engage us to the end. While some of them are more or less than cardboard figures to be eliminated by that hand along the story, the rest of them are no better than that, and that makes the film all the more tiresome. To make matters worse, the movie also resorts to a certain familiar genre convention without much success, and that may remind you that there have many better films which handle that genre convention much more skillfully.

Eventually, there comes an inevitable point where Bong-soo and a few other surviving characters stick together for getting out of the bathroom as soon as possible, but the movie remains as tepid and uninteresting as before. You may appreciate some influence from a certain striking moment from the finale of Roman Polanski’s “Repulsion” (1965), and the movie thankfully becomes a bit more fun around that point, but then it hurriedly moves forward to its finishing line where it clumsily tries to catch us off guard again.

Although they did not have much to do from the beginning, the few main cast members of the movie acquit themselves fairly well. While often limited by their superficial roles, Lee Jae-won and Park Sang-wook are convincing at least as their characters are cornered more and more by the supernatural force of that hand along the story, and Jeong Seo-ha manages to hold her own place well around them even though her character remains under-developed just like several other characters in the story.

Overall, “The Hand”, which is incidentally not associated at all with Oliver Stone’s early horror film “The Hand” (1981), is quite disappointing in many ways, and my only consolation is that its tedious impression on me is quickly faded after I watched it and then started to write this review. Sure, the movie is not exactly one of my worst movie experiences during several recent years, but it is still pretty lousy in my humble opinion, and I am depressed to see how it ends up being limited by not only its low production budget but also numerous incompetent aspects.

By the way, I must tell you that Cameron and Colin Cairnes’ recent horror film “Late Night with the Devil” (2024) is currently being shown in South Korean theaters, and I gladly recommend it instead if you want to be really scared and entertained. Believe me, you will have a much more productive time with that small but solid genre product, and you may thank me for that later.