South Korean horror film “Salmokji: Whispering Water” is ready to unnerve and then scare you from the very beginning, and it did its job as well as intended. While this is a very typical horror movie about your average haunted spot, there is enough sense of dread and suspense to hold your attention to the end, and you will gladly go along with that despite occasionally being not entirely sure about what is exactly going on the screen.

After the opening scene effectively setting the overall tone of the movie, we meet Su-in (Kim Hye-yoon) and several colleagues of hers who happen to work together during one weekend. They work for an online road-view service company, and there suddenly came a rather odd problem involved with some remote reservoir outside Seoul. The footage shot along the road around that reservoir shows something weird on the reservoir, and, assuming that this is just a technical glitch, Su-in’s boss demands that they should go there right now for shooting the replacement footage to be uploaded as quickly as possible.

Needless to say, we soon sense some aura of spookiness not long after Su-in and her colleagues arrive at the reservoir, whose name is incidentally “Salmokji”. In Chinese letters, this name literally means “Dead Tree Pond” (殺木池), and, according to one of Su-in’s colleagues, this spot was originally a cemetery before the reservoir was built upon it.

And then there come several bad signs for our main characters. They find a mysterious stone tower near the lake, and they also encounter a strange old lady who seems to be hiding something from them. While she does not scare them a lot, we cannot help but feel uneasier when this old lady suggests that they should add a stone to the tower as making each own wish.

The mood becomes more unsettling when a certain figure unexpectedly appears later. Because he is also one of Su-in’s colleagues, Su-in is initially glad to have another person to help get her job done as soon as possible, but, of course, she somehow finds herself gradually unnerved about him. After all, he was inexplicably absent for a while before appearing in front of Su-in and her colleagues, and, above all, he actually went to the reservoir not long before his sudden absence.

As adding one little disturbing moment after another, the movie steadily dials up the level of uneasiness, and there are several effective scenes which utilize well those video cameras of the main characters. At one point in the story, one of them casually walks along the road alone by himself for shooting the road-view footage with his camera, and we come to brace ourselves as Su-in checks on this raw footage via her remote-control panel in the meantime.

It is not much of a spoiler to tell you that 1) Su-in and her colleagues eventually find themselves stuck around the reservoir and 2) there comes much more tension and fear as the night inevitably begins. Yes, there is indeed something insidious in the reservoir, and it becomes quite possible that they may not survive this increasingly spooky night no matter how hard they try to fight against whatever is holding them in one way or another.

If you are a seasoned moviegoer quite familiar with many recent horror flicks such as “The Conjuring” (2013) and its several following sequels, you will not be that surprised by all those shocks and awes to pop up along the story, but the movie skillfully doles them out at least. As a result, we get more engaged even though we often find ourselves as disoriented as its main characters, and we also get some dark fun from how they are relentlessly thrown into more panic and confusion before the eventual finale.

I must point out that many of its main characters are as thin as the cardboard characters to be eliminated in those Friday the 13th movies. In fact, you can easily guess who will be the first victim right from when the main characters are introduced to us at the beginning of the story, though the movie provides a bit of surprise from that. It goes without saying that Su-in will be assigned to that typical genre role in the end, but the movie does not bring much depth to her except her rather vague anxiety about water.

Fortunately, the main cast members diligently fill their respective parts on the whole. Kim Hye-yoon, who was unforgettable as the strong-willed heroine of “The Girl on a Bulldozer” (2022), has enough presence to support her archetype character, and we come to care about what may happen next – even when her character’ viewpoint becomes quite tricky during the finale. In case of several supporting performers around her, Lee Jong-won, Kim Jun-han, Kim Young-sung, Oh Dong-min, and Yoon Jae-chan are convincing in their characters’ growing dread and panic along the story, and the special mention goes to Jang Da-ah, who provides a bit of humorous levity early in the story.

In conclusion, “Salmokji: Whispering Water” has enough amount of good spooky moments for recommendation, and director/writer Lee Sang-min made a competent feature film debut here. Although it did not terrify me a lot as I frequently observed how it works from the distance, I appreciate its mood and skill nonetheless, and it is one of the interesting genre works from South Korean cinema during this year.

Sidenote: The reservoir in the film is actually a real location, and, what do you know, it has already drawn a lot of curious visitors since the movie was released in South Korea. Of course, nothing particularly spooky has happened yet – so far.