In modern day Seoul, there's a serial killer on the rampage. Not content to simply off his victims and be done with it, he takes it a couple of steps further than your average psychopath and has a nasty habit of burning off the flesh of his victims faces with a powerful acid. Not only is this twisted, but it makes the detectives who are assigned to the case work a lot more difficult than it already was in the first place.

Thankfully for the cops on the force, there's Hyun-min, an extremely intelligent man who used to make his living as a forensic sculptor who specialized in reconstructing the faces of people who had been killed or murdered in such a way as to lead to facial disfigurement. How did he do this? By examining and in turn interpreting what they would look like in real life based on the size and shape of their skulls. Seeing as the killer on the loose has been leaving the skulls pretty much intact, it would seem that Hyun-min is the right man for the job and that he should be able to help the cops quite a bit.

Things start to get odd for him when he decides to take his work home with him. Once the bones of the victims are in his house, his young daughter starts to act really strange and she starts having horrifying and nightmarish visions from someone else's past. As his daughter's condition worsens and becomes more and more intense, Hyun-min tries to put together all the pieces of a very macabre puzzle in hopes of saving her from whatever strange malady is wreaking havoc wit her mind and her soul.

At this point in time, it should surprise no one to find out that Hyun-min's daughter is being haunted by a longhaired creepy female ghost. Like we've seen countless times in the recent crop of Asian horror movies, this ghost likes to appear in the background or make sudden appearances right up front, which makes for some fun jump scares but ultimately leaves no real lasting impression – and that's a shame as Face adds an interesting element of forensics and police investigation to the Asian ghost story that could have been something very cool had the filmmakers concentrated more on putting together a story that broke a little new ground for once.

That being said, Face is an entertaining movie, even if it isn't even close to a very original one. There is some nice atmosphere throughout the bulk of the running time and the pacing is quite good in that it isn't even dull, even if we don't have much trouble figuring out where it's all going and why. The cinematography is slick and professional looking and the jump scares, despite not having any lasting effect, are a fun, if very fleeting and obviously temporary cheap thrill.

The DVD

Video:

Aside from some mild trailing in a few scenes, Tartan's 1.85.1 anamorphic widescreen transfer is quite good. The black levels, which play an extremely important part in the effectiveness of certain scenes in this film, stay deep and strong and don't break up or pixelate at all. There is some mild line shimmering in a couple of scenes but there aren't any issues with mpeg compression artifacts or serious edge enhancement. Color reproduction appears lifelike and accurate and there's a reasonably decent level of fine detail in both the foreground and the background of the image. Skin tones look healthy and realistic and overall the picture is generally quite sharp.