The Cat Review

An utterly pointless movie.

Korean import The Cat is a measure of woeful meretriciousness marked by a misguided attempt at storytelling that is no less desultory than its effort to wave hackneyed horror movie shenanigans at audiences. The outcome is a motion picture that feels so creatively suffocated in ways more than one that even the finest feline pulchritude could not save it from turning into a restlessly clueless affair that sees the script ad-lib a timeworn handful of chicanery in order to choke the running time before the largely uninspired conclusion finally spills the beans on the last ingredient in the recipe for the most unnecessary movie ever produced.

At the heart of this premise is So-Yeon (Park Min-Young), a pet groomer who adopts a white Persian cat after its owner is found dead in an elevator. She soon becomes constantly haunted by female child with a bob cut, face charred and eyes glowing green and oblique like a cat. She thinks little of it until her cat starts behaving weirdly and people around her, including her good friend Bo-Hee (Shin Da-Eun) and boss, begin dying mysteriously. With help from her childhood crush and police officer Joon-Suk (Kim Dong-Wook), she must unravel the conundrum before she gets killed too.

Perhaps The Cat has a problem most curious – its confused filmmakers don’t really know what they want to do with their movie. If you must know what they did with the film, I have a rough account: They threw a cat into the scene, ensuring that it looked as scary as possible while glaring fiercely into thin air and reaching out its paws to some invisible entity. It suddenly became intimidated and hid under a blanket, bed or behind some clothes. And with a pinch of magic, it either morphed into a terrifying girl with a head slightly misplaced or conjured that same girl from the deepest of its horrific imagination. When the character searched for it, the frightening girl appeared from its hiding place to terrorise its victim. The visibly shaken victim stared shocked at the sight, too asphyxiated to let a scream or tear out but nearly enough for a few copulation-esque huffs and puffs. The only issue is the fact that the brainless filmmakers think that it is perfectly fine to recycle the same sequence for half a dozen times before the conclusion. After the second sequence, I suspect few people would maintain interest in the movie.

At the very least, the filmmakers are punctilious enough to exercise the perfunctory shock scenes with a reasonable level of visual decency if only to mask the fact that the audiences just wasted money on a predictable, stale and pointless film. In actuality, The Cat does not really have much of a story to tell. Amidst the deaths around them, So-Yeon and Joon-Suk are more concerned about becoming a couple, reporting for work daily and even helping a senile old woman find her way home than making any tangible progress in uncovering the mysteries of their plight. It is a conspicuously unfocused movie that lacks any substantial amount of development within the main plot before the conclusion.

By all means, look forward to the conclusion because it provides a respectable wrapping for the mediocre film – just don’t expect it to be any better. Like much of the film, the denouement feels limp and ambitionless. Any sentiment that the audiences may have invested in the cats is disposed of quickly as the conclusion does away with the film’s relationship with the cats and dissolves it into a stereotypical ‘child wants to take revenge by killing innocent people because bad guys cause her death’. It is a distasteful way to make audiences cavort in silliness because they actually believe that watching a horror movie titled The Cat means watching a flick with cats which possess at least some preternatural abilities. In retrospect, wouldn’t ‘The Girl and the Cat’ or ‘The Cat Girl’ make more appropiate titles?