IF 'PHONE' RINGS, JUST HANG UP

REVIEWED - PHONE: The latest film in the generally excellent Tiger Beer Tartan Asia Extreme Season (more next year, please) is the least impressive so far, writes Donald Clarke.

A haunted mobile phone? Somehow, it just doesn't work, does it? One can't shake the image of a Korean producer rummaging through his pockets on the way out of a screening of Ringu searching for an item that might be invested with the same menace as the videotape in Hideo Nakata's shocker. Pencil? No. Comb? Hardly. Aha, now what's this?

Ji-Won Ha plays an investigative reporter who starts receiving threatening calls after writing an article about a sex scandal. She changes her number, but the calls only seem to get weirder.

Then one afternoon, while on a visit to a shockingly white art gallery, her niece picks up the phone, hears something frightful and goes completely berserk. Seo-woo Eun, who plays the unfortunate nipper, is by far the best thing in the film. With angry little eyes and a formidable ability to twist her face into demonic contortions, she may be the most effective possessed youngster we have seen on screen since Linda Blair turned heads in The Exorcist.

Sadly, nothing much else works. As the heroine visits previous holders of the cursed phone number, the film seems to be about to launch itself into portmanteau territory, but we only get sketchy information about earlier victims. We are, however, offered an interlude in a spooky house, some business with in vitro fertilisation and a subplot involving an earlier marital infidelity by Ji-Won's brother-in-law.

Frustratingly, each of these half-formed stories is handled with sufficient skill to suggest that director Byoung-ki Ahn might have made something interesting of any one of them had be been granted the gift of focus. What we get instead is something of a mess.