Coma (2005)

Coma (2005)

Dirs: Various | 5 episodes, approx 55 minutes each.

A South Korean miniseries set mostly inside a hospital that's almost completely abandoned, having recently been marked for closure.

A young professional woman named Yoon Young (Lee Se Eun) is sent into the hospital to check insurance criteria are being met by the few remaining staff members, all of whom are suspiciously reticent about why there's a single female patient still in the ward. The patient, Lee So Hee (Cha Soo Yun), is in a coma, unable to speak for herself.

Investigating why So Hee is there and why she's in a comatose state opens a door to a horror/mystery that leads to a dramatic and creepy conclusion. If you have a morbid fear of hospitals, you may want to avoid watching.

The building has ghosts: the dead kind that act independently, with long, face-obscuring hair and a grudge, and the haunting memory kind that are trapped in a moment, destined to replay a tragic event over and over.

Subsequent episodes simultaneously expand upon the sleeping girl's past and offer up new stories with new characters, each somehow tied into it. Within that framework are a small number of different time periods overlapping.

The narrative throws around a lot of what appear to be red herrings as it gathers the disparate threads together, but they weave into a satisfying conclusion, so don't get too frustrated if you feel a little lost from time to time.

The lighting is notable. A lot of the time the colour is either drained out of the picture or the cold, murky appearance of the concrete is extended to every other aspect of production. The closest approximation I can think of is the aesthetic of most survival horror games: the flickering corridor lights, the shit-smeared and blood-stained half-tiled walls, etc.

An over-reliance on the now clichéd Asian horror sounds (clicking/grinding bones and scratching/shuffling corpse) was tiresome, but the series was aired in 2005 and that may have been less of an issue then. Had I been lucky enough to see it in 2005, I'm positive that I'd have liked it much more.

The final episode is the best.