Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Park Sye-young
Starring: Moon Hyein, Haam Seokyoung, On Jeongyen , Jung Sumin
Several horror movies have been centred around threats posed by
inanimate objects, from a fridge (The Refrigerator) to a car tyre (Rubber). In 1977 writer/director George Barry gave us the surreal horror
Death Bed, in which a bed possessed by a demon eats anyone it comes into contact
with.
For his feature debut, Korean filmmaker Park Sye-young offers a
similar premise to that of Barry's film, but rather than an out and out
horror movie, The Fifth Thoracic Vertebra uses its silly
set-up for a whimsical, even melancholy look at loneliness.
The inanimate antagonist of Sye-young's film is a mattress that becomes
infected with a fungus while in the apartment of a young woman studying
fungi. Living with a man who barely acknowledges her through a series of
grunts, she's one half of the first of the film's several troubled
relationships. When the woman leaves her disinterested boyfriend, the
mattress sprouts an appendage that attaches itself to his vertebra and
sucks out his life force.
As the mattress travels from one owner to the next like a cum-stained
cousin of the donkey in Au Hasard Balthasar, it repeats this action, feeding on whoever is unfortunate enough to
lie upon it. This includes a bickering couple who check into a seedy
love motel (in a scene that feels inspired by Derek Cianfrance's
Blue Valentine); a dying woman; a delivery driver celebrating his 37th birthday with
a cupcake in his van; and a horny couple who maul each other behind the
mattress in an alleyway.
It might sound like the sort of horror-comedy put out by Troma, but
scares and shocks seem far from Sye-young's aim. If there's a recent
movie it has anything in common with it's David Lowery's
A Ghost Story, in which Casey Affleck donned a bedsheet to play a ghost doomed to
observe the living humans in his vicinity. The mattress serves a similar
purpose here, though of course it's compelled to feed on its human
roommates.
At little over an hour long,
The Fifth Thoracic Vertebra never quite allows us to get
to know the various human characters that fall victim to the mattress,
and as a result the melancholy Sye-young appears to be aiming for never
quite hits home. Almost everyone here seems awfully sad, but we never
really get to know why this might be the case. Still, there are moments
where you find yourself feeling sorry for…yes, a mattress, as it wanders
aimlessly through life. One long shot of the mattress trudging forlornly
through a field like Michael Myers in Rob Zombie's
Halloween 2 is indefinably affecting. By the time the film
has skipped centuries ahead to the point where the mattress has
disappeared under a mountain of fungus, you may find yourself flipping
over your own mattress to make sure it hasn't succumbed to any sickness
of its own.
