Korean director Il-gon Song's Spider Forest is an interesting, if a tad melodramatic, blend of horror, romance and mystery that takes only a little while to get going and ends up to be a fairly well made thriller that keeps you guessing until the end.

The titular location of the Spider Forest is a massive and lonely wooded area where local folk lore claims that the souls of the dead continue to exist after their passing as spiders until they're remembered by someone who is still living. A television producer named Min wanders through the forest up to a cabin to meet his boss and his girlfriend, but when he arrives there, he finds that his boss has been chopped up and killed with a sickle and his girlfriend, now on her death bed, is babbling incoherently about spiders.

Unfortunately for Min, the killer is still in the cabin. Min grabs the sickle and chases him out into the eerie woods that surround them, but the murderer turns around and clocks Min so hard in the head that he becomes dizzy. The killer escapes, and Min wanders into traffic where he's hit by a fast moving car.

Two weeks later, Min has come out of a pretty serious coma and is slowly but surely recovering from the events that landed him in the hospital. A police officer named Choi, who knows Min from before the events, questions him on the murders and it's here that we learn how Min lost his wife in an airplane crash which in turn lead to his affair with the girl who was killed in the cabin. We also learn that he was in the midst of developing a story about the legends surrounding the Spider Forest and while doing his research he became acquainted with a mysterious and beautiful woman named Su-In. As they get to know one another, she tells him of a double homicide and the story of a ghost. For some reason these sound familiar to Min, but he can't quite put his finger on why…

Spider Forest might alienate some people as it doesn't unfold in the traditional linear fashion that a lot of people are accustomed to and it does jump around a bit as it tells its tale, but those who are willing to devote enough attention to it should enjoy the film. The ending is quite clever, the performances are all very solid, and the cinematography is slick but not over done. A few moments of harsh violence shake things up in a few spots and the story unfolds at a pretty deliberate pace. While the middle of the film drags just a little bit, there's enough going on here to make even the slower moments of the movie worth enjoying.

In terms of structure, there's some oddball dream logic used in a couple of scenes and at times the movie almost made me think of Memento but it goes in a very different direction than that film and it isn't as easy to figure out either.

Video:

Aside from some mild trailing in a few scenes in the darker moments of the film, 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. Print damage is never a problem and the image is nice and clean.