Review of 23:59 (2011) by Jon R — 12 Jan 2019

Three quarters of the way through this movie, I regretted the time I'd spent. At the end, I was glad.

As a life-long American, I admit that I like Asian films because of the differences in (pop?) culture you can detect in them. The dialog is often a bit alien to me, so the way tension is resolved is interesting: some aspects of it I can identify with, and some I cannot.

Up til the three quarter mark, I was frustrated by the inscrutable motivations most characters seemed to have for what they said & did minute-by-minute. Their reactions to various things really didn't make much sense to me. I've come to recognize some of this (with Asian films in general) as a loss due to translation - which is why I guess I'm more tolerant of their films than I would be in a western film. Still, at the 3/4 mark, it felt like I just needed to see the end in order to forget it.

The last quarter, though, turned the movie around for me. Giving it three stars, I wont claim it was earth shattering - but it was the kind of ending which tuned the movie from "bad horror" to "less-than-well-executed ghost story" - and this is why I liked it. It could have ended differently and more predictably, but it didn't, and for me that's why I enjoyed it quite a bit.

I wouldn't recommend this to someone unless I knew they really enjoyed scary/creepy. There are scarier & creepier movies out there, but this one has some good feedback on human regret and sadness, which I really hadn't seen coming - and enjoyed it for that reason.