Television reality shows like The Swan and I Want a Famous Face, which center heavily around cosmetic surgery, are frightening enough on their own, without the world of cinema on hand to help. But the Korean chiller Cinderella is here to give the idea of changing one's appearance out of sheer vanity a supernatural spin all its own. Admittedly, it's a terrific premise ripe with oodles of potential to scare the bejeebers out of viewers while making a statement about society's fascination with nipping and tucking. Sadly, you can't deduce that from watching Cinderella, a film whose message is buried under frame upon frame of shoddy directing, ineffective scares, and a dunderheaded script. 

Hyun-su (Shin Se-kyung) is a typical high schooler who lives alone with her mother (Do Ji-won), a skilled plastic surgeon. Her mother's occupation has definitely attracted the attention of her vain friends, all of whom go under the knife for a little facial sprucing-up. But tragedy strikes Hyun-su's circle of friends when one of her schoolmates who had recently undergone surgery commits suicide by cutting up her face to shreds. Her surviving pals report hearing creepy whispers wherever they go, leading Hyun-su to believe a supernatural force might be at work. As it turns out, she may be right, for a trip into her mother's dark past turns up a horrifying secret kept from her during her entire life, one causing Hyun-su to think the skeletons in her mom's closet have returned to settle a terrible score.

If the above summary seems a bit on the skimpy side,  that's what happens when a movie leaves you with very little in terms of plotting. Much like the recent Apartment 1303, the sort of "investigation" at the heart of Cinderella doesn't so much involve the actual uncovering of clues as it does big twists being flat-out explained to the heroine. But the main trouble with Cinderella isn't that its lead character makes a poor excuse for a detective; it's that the viewers are the ones being spoon-fed the story's most important information, with about two-thirds of the film dedicated to spelling out the entire plot for us instead of letting us tackle the situation on our own. Left to its own devices, the film is a gigantic mess, completely confused about what it wants to be.

On the one hand, the movie seems like a cautionary drama about family and to what extent one should pay for the price of beauty. Had it stayed on this track, Cinderella might have turned out to be a relevant and intriguing tale, but director Bong Man-dae tries to shove in as many traditional Asian horror elements as possible, none of which are well-established or executed well enough to leave a lasting impression. This leaves the story feeling even more cluttered and muddled than before, and as the story progresses,  viewers -- and I think even the filmmakers -- lose more and more interest in the proceedings. The lead characters are difficult to care about as a result, and the supporting ones are dispensable to an almost shocking degree. Shin Se-kyung's performance as Hyun-su isn't bad by any means, but there's a definite lack of interest in her fate as well as in what's happening to those around her.  

Simply put, as a combination horror/drama, Cinderella comes across as neither scary nor thematically alluring. It wastes whatever potential it started with, thanks to a horrible sense of pacing and direction, in the end turning out to be pretty...well, horrible.

MY RATING: * (out of ****)

(Released by Tartan Video; not rated by MPAA.)