MEMENTO MORI

Min-ah discovers a scarlet-covered diary as she is hurrying to school. It’s the shared journal of two classmates of hers, Hyo-shin and Shi-eun. She has a brief hallucinatory experience when she opens it, initiating a series of strange occurrences, which eventually draw Min-ah into the eerie world of the diary. In her desire to find out more about the contents of her find, she feigns an illness, getting permission to lie down in the school’s clinic. There she witnesses the reunion of Hyo-shin and Shi-eun. Meanwhile, the day at the girls’ high school is half over. Suddenly a sharp scream announces the death of Hyo-shin. While various rumours surrounding her death spread throughout the school, Min-ah continues to follow the trails left behind in the diary’s writings. And like the inscribed incantation “Memento Mori” (remember the dead) suggests, she senses the ghostly entity of Hyo-shin, which seems to linger in every corner of the school. Young Korean debut directors Tae-yong Kim and Kyu-dong Min have made a compelling horror film about the death of a high school girl and a group of teenage girls who are forced to deal with this tragic incident. You can feel their warm gaze upon the world of adolescents who are going trough the trials and tribulations of growing up. Memento Mori is based on intensive research into teenage suicides. As the small pleasures and pains are unravelled from each page of the diary, the tension that lurks around the experience of a girl’s high school turns into pure horror.