By Simon Thompson
‘If it ‘ain’t broke don’t fix it’ is a principle South Korean director Lee-Moon Young seems to have a fantastic understanding of, as shown by his movie The Human Trap. The beauty of The Human Trap is that it doesn’t try to pretentiously re-invent the wheels of the slasher genre, but instead takes the basic fundamentals (young adult protagonists, a rural/isolated setting, a psychopathic killer etc) and presents them to the audience engagingly and freshly which prevents the narrative from becoming a stale, cliché spotting checklist devoid of any entertainment.
The plot of The Human Trap focuses on a group of four teenagers who decide to go on a weekend camping trip. When they arrive at the camping site however, they are met by an overly friendly Christian camp-guide (think Ned Flanders by way of Yoshigake Kira) whose outwardly earnest pleasantness seems to be belying some kind of terrible secret about the surrounding area and the function of the campsite itself.
What makes The Human Trap work is the chemistry of the main characters, which through Lee Moon-Young’s excellent dialogue are richly drawn and believable, this is because Lee Moon-Young manages to avoid the traps of either making them genius level problem solvers with a solution for every difficulty, Bear Grylls level survival experts, or complete babbling idiots with fridge temperature IQs. Instead, they react as anybody else would in their situation, at first they pay little mind to it, but as it grows more and more dire their reactions become one of fear, panic, and bickering like actual human beings’ would.
Visually The Human Trap is absolutely gorgeous to look at. Lee-Moon Young is a skilled visual stylist who manages to render the sparse and unforgiving winter of the movie’s location beautifully, but does so to establish an oppressive and uneasy atmosphere with the isolated nature of the countryside that is being presented making us starkly aware of just how trapped the characters are.
Overall The Human Trap is like a delicious bowl of stew or a good pair of jeans, in that while there are more experimental and Avant Garde options available, sometimes all you want to see is the time-honoured basics done with a witty script, beautiful cinematography, a tense atmosphere, and some truly visceral gore.
Although I’m not going to put this movie in the same category as I would other South Korean horror such as The Host or Train to Busan, if you want a breezy and well executed Deliverance and Straw Dogs style rural horror which does what it says on the tin, The Human Trap is the movie for you.
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