IMDb plot summary: A magician meets an eccentric girl and offers her to work together in his magic show. It is only until a year later that he starts to know her personally and develops a feeling towards her despite her own problems.
Directed by In-ho Hwang. Starring Ye-jin Son, Min-ki Lee, Cheol-min Park, and Hyun-sook Kim.
This was the second Korean supernatural romance I watched in the span of a few days, and this one doesn't fare quite as well as The Beauty Inside. This story features a magician and one of his introverted crew members, who it turns out is quiet and withdrawn because, like young Haley Joel Osment, she sees dead people. Frequently, that dead person is a friend of hers who she was in a horrible accident with. She and her friend were both in need of emergency assistance, but she got it first, resulting her friend's death and lasting anger beyond the grave. The tone of this movie is confusing to me, bouncing back and forth between broad, over-the-top comedy and abruptly dark emotional moments, and the two never quite coalesce the way I'd like. The darker emotional moments do actually kind of work, but they work primarily outside the film's context, when ideally they'd be enhancing it. The romance also begins with the male lead being exceptionally pushy and ignoring the social boundaries she'd set up for herself, and as a result it's hard to find him endearing much of the rest of the time. It definitely suffers more in comparison to The Beauty Inside, but I'm not sure I'd have been wowed by it on its own either.
How it entered my Flickchart:
Spellbound < Hans Christian Andersen
Spellbound > The Life of David Gale
Spellbound > House of Games
Spellbound > The Sasquatch Gang
Spellbound < Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves
Spellbound < The Asphalt Jungle
Spellbound > If I Forget
Spellbound < The Wiz
Spellbound < UHF
Spellbound < House of Flying Daggers
Spellbound < Nacho Libre
Spellbound < The Time Traveler's Wife
Final spot: #1770 out of 3192, or 45%.
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