Like other critics here, I'll invoke the names of some Korean movies that, similar to Gabal, have a special "shine" to them: Bunshinsaba, Tale of Two Sisters, and especially 4 Inyong Shiktak (Uninvited). Like those flicks, Gabal (The Wig) has that special "it."
What do I mean? Well, the emphasis is on characters, characters the viewer cares about (I did my fair share of both weeping and recoiling while watching); there's a dreadfully heavy sadness draping the entire affair; there's a palpable feeling of helplessness, of futility. And you simply HATE to see these already world-weary characters wrapped in such a futile, and almost randomly violent, circumstance. This is not a movie about a possessed wig leaping off the floor and strangling people. If you're looking for silly Halloween fun, hit the road. In fact, the movie really isn't about a wig at all. It is about how our fragile bodies are susceptible to diseases, like leukemia, that no one deserves to suffer. It is about how our fragile minds are susceptible to false hopes, and about how manipulative, and downright evil, we can be when we are in relationship with other human beings.
The movie confronts forced silence (one of the characters cannot speak, and her voice, when she forces it, sounds like scraping metal or a painfully squeaky door hinge). It confronts death, not in a glamorized way, but a kind of death that is a "wasting away" in an antiseptic hospital bed. The lead character's struggle with leukemia and chemotherapy, and her consequent downward spiral into a supernatural nightmare as she wears a possessed wig to cover her baldness, reminded me, wistfully, of Mann, the main character in the first Pang brothers' movie, Eye (a franchise that has simply gone down the toilet).
As a somewhat jaded viewer of horror movies (I suffered through the remake of The Fog a few weeks agoMEA CULPA!), I am so surprised and practically gleeful when I come across a serious-minded, carefully crafted, complex horror movie that has that special "it," that ineffable substance that is a mixture of artistically presented dread, sadness, loss, and threat--of course with a few jump scares thrown in for good measure! This movie speaks and lives its dread, perhaps not as loudly or as skillfully as 4 Inyong Shiktak (Uninvited), but it comes damn close.
