Arachnophobes beware! The title Spider Forest is no joke, and not a play on words. Spindly, spooky spiders do indeed crawl on (and into) people in this movie… but that’s not what it’s about. The spiders are just a byproduct of the plot in this suspenseful, involving Korean horror/thriller/procedural.

We first meet a man whose life is a tangled web of tragedy that becomes more stickier still when he follows the clues of a deadly mystery that begins at a bloody crime scene deep in an isolated forest. The murdered, violated bodies of a man and a woman are found in a remote cabin … Who are they? Why did they have to die so cruelly? Who killed them? We soon find that the woman is the distraught man’s wife, and the corpse is what’s left of her lover. A question spins: Did the husband actually see the man who killed them, or is it he himself he’s seeing in id form?

Writer/director Ilgon-Song does an excellent job of putting three very good characters — the cop, his quarry, and the beautiful woman who ties them together — together and playing with them like chess pieces making for a mind game well worth watching.

Part fairy tale, part horror opus, Spider Forest is by turns dreamy and dreary, bloody and beautiful. It’s also too slow-moving at times, and often cloudy, but if you’re in the right mood and able to give the film your full attention you won’t be disappointed.

The DVD has on-set interviews with each of the three main stars, plus a few deleted scenes and a behind-the-scenes look at the filming. Unfortunately, there is very little insight offered from the writer/director.

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Reviewed by Staci Layne Wilson