At a repressive girls school, Min-ah (Min-sun Kim) finds the joint diary of Hyo-shi (Yeh-jin Park) and Shi-eun (Young-jin Lee), two schoolmates who had an affair but now are seldom together. Min-ah becomes obsessed with the book and the two girls’ lives. After Hyo-shi plummets from the roof to her death, Min-ah believes she’s being hunted by the dead girls angry spirit.
A semi-sequel to the very successful Whispering Corridors, Whispering Corridors 2, also known as Memento Mori, is a simple, bland, and un-engaging teen drama with some out-of-place ghostly action tossed in at the end. If you’re looking for thrills and chills, you’re out of luck. If you’re looking for a touching romance between two schoolgirls and the tragedy that can come from their living in a restrictive society, well, you’re out of luck there too. If you’re looking for whiny, catty, and over-the-top obnoxious teen girls, then finally, you’re in the right place.
Let’s get the horror aspect out of the way: there isn’t any. A ghost shows up at the end, but outside of feeling-up Min-ah for no apparent reason, does nothing more than play with the lights, turn on and off the water, lock the door, and visit one weak-willed teacher. None of that is frightening, though it is the best part of the film purely from a technical point of view. The early sections of the movie look like the crew was still working out where the camera should go.
For the rest, you’ve got three characters. Min-ah is a passive reader. She has no story of her own, does nothing, and could have been cut out of the movie. Yet, she’s the one we follow as she sits and reads, lies down and reads, and even (wait for it…) stands and reads. Outside of her fervent love of reading about other people’s lives, we learn nothing about her. She’s a blank from beginning to end.
Shi-eun and Hyo-shi aren’t blank non-entities, just close. We find out surprisingly little about these two and even less about their relationship and feelings. Shi-eun is a runner with degenerating hearing. She also must take a lot of drugs because she looks like she’s going to doze off at any moment. Let’s just say she’s not a dynamic personality. Hyo-shi plays the piano and acts randomly. Her behavior isn’t that of a confused teen in love, but of someone who uses dice to decide her next move. She’s also sleeping with her male teacher out of pity. Does this upset Shi-eun? Who knows? Do the two girls have anything in common? Again, who knows? Homosexuality is hardly accepted widely in the world, but in Korea it has a special place. Officially it doesn’t exist. That may be the problem here. With so little in Korean art and literature dealing with lesbian girls, the filmmakers had no idea how to portray the relationship. That’s only a guess. What’s certain is they failed in painting both the girls and how they interacted.
Like the original Whispering Corridors, this film is no fan of the Korean education system. The sadism of the faculty has been toned down (it’s still there, but the number of girls beaten to the floor has been significantly reduced) in favor of their inability to teach and general frailty. In the first, a teacher tried to sleep with a student by making creepy innuendoes and touching her inappropriately. Now, a teacher succeeds by whimpering and looking pathetic. The focus has shifted from useless and vicious teachers to stupid and cruel students. Wouldn’t it be cool if a ghost came along and gave these horrible people exactly what they deserve? Probably would be, but it doesn’t happen in this picture. Justice is as missing as realism and entertainment.
The other films in the series are Whispering Corridors (1998), Whispering Corridors 3: Wishing Stairs (2003), and Whispering Corridors 4: The Voice (2005).