South Korean Horror, Now With More Existential Panic
Let’s start with the obvious: Loner (Oetori) is a horror film that manages to make both social commentary and a psychotic breakdown look chic. It’s about hikikomori — people who lock themselves away from the world — and yet, ironically, it’s one of those movies that makes you want to stay indoors forever afterward.
Directed by Park Jae-shik in his feature debut (because apparently he wanted to announce himself to the world by traumatizing it), Loner takes the idea of isolation and wraps it in family secrets, rotting corpses, and more vermin than a New York subway. It’s dark, twisted, tragic, and — somehow — also kind of funny, if you have the kind of gallows humor that pairs trauma with popcorn.
Plot: When Therapy Is Not Enough
Our tale of cheerful despair begins with 17-year-old Jeong Soo-na, a high school girl whose best friend, Han-jeong, is bullied so viciously she kills herself. This naturally causes Soo-na to spiral into full-blown agoraphobia, which is Korean for “good luck ever seeing daylight again.”
From there, the film becomes a slow descent into madness, grief, and family dysfunction so severe it could make Freud pack up and retire.
Soo-na’s father — wait, uncle — no, actually her father-uncle Se-jin (look, it’s complicated) lives with her and her grandmother in a sprawling mansion, because no Korean horror movie is complete without a house big enough to fit everyone’s secrets and several ghosts. When Se-jin’s old flame Song-i tries to re-enter the picture, Grandma responds with the kind of energy you only get from someone who’s been storing rage since the Korean War: she beats the woman nearly to death.
Then things start to get… moist.
Soo-na begins seeing vermin crawling all over her body, and her room slowly turns into a cross between A Beautiful Mindand a rodent-infested haunted house. When the family’s housemaid dares to check on her, Soo-na knocks her out and stuffs her in a barrel with the corpse of their dog. Yes, this movie takes “bad mental health day” to an entirely new level.
Family Secrets and the World’s Worst Dinner Conversation
At dinner — because apparently horror characters can’t just eat quietly like normal people — Soo-na drops a bombshell: she reveals that Se-jin is actually her father, not her uncle, and that her mother was his student. In other words, the film suddenly transforms into an episode of Maury Povich directed by Edgar Allan Poe.
Everyone freaks out, as you would when discovering your family tree is more like a knot. Se-jin’s fiancée, Yoon-mi, is so outraged she nearly combusts on the spot, while Grandma acts like she didn’t see this coming, despite the obvious fact that she’s the type of woman who’s fought at least two exorcisms with her bare hands.
The Vermin Make a Comeback
Soo-na’s psychological collapse continues, complete with hallucinations of her dead friend, buckets of blood, and the kind of room hygiene that would give Marie Kondo a stroke. The grandmother tries to intervene by climbing a ladder to her room — and Soo-na, in a moment of pure “I’m done with everyone” energy, kicks it away, breaking Grandma’s back.
Later that night, Soo-na kills her. Probably because the movie ran out of people to traumatize in Act 2.
Meanwhile, Song-i (her biological mother and queen of bad romantic decisions) dies in a train accident. Se-jin reacts by having a tearful conversation with Soo-na through her bedroom door, confessing that he only left Song-i because she was already married when he got out of the army — which is both tragic and peak Korean drama energy.
If this movie had a drinking game for every time someone cries through a wooden door, you’d be dead by the halfway mark.
Plot Twist: The Roommate From Hell (Literally)
Just when you think Loner couldn’t possibly get weirder, the film reveals that the real source of evil isn’t Soo-na’s grief or guilt — it’s her secret half-sister, Mi-jeong, who’s been hanging out in her room the whole time like the world’s creepiest bunkmate.
Mi-jeong, we learn, grew up in an abusive home and resents Soo-na for living the “good life” with their shared father. Naturally, her response is to murder most of the family and make the house smell like an autopsy lab.
In the film’s bleakly hilarious climax, Mi-jeong impersonates Soo-na, jumps off the roof, and dies — because in Korean horror, no ghost goes down without a dramatic rooftop exit. Soo-na is then confined to a mental institution, where she confesses that she let Mi-jeong commit the crimes because she felt guilty for her privileged life.
Se-jin, now fully broken and covered in — you guessed it — vermin, sits at a table, stabs it, and goes quietly insane. The movie ends not with a bang, but with the sound of a man realizing that family therapy probably would’ve been cheaper.
The Performances: Everyone Deserves Therapy (and an Award)
Go Eun-ah as Soo-na gives a performance so raw and believable you forget she’s acting and start Googling psychiatric facilities. Her slow collapse from grief-stricken teen to full-blown recluse is both horrifying and heartbreakingly sympathetic.
Jeong Yoo-seok as Se-jin deserves a medal for portraying the saddest, most emotionally constipated father in South Korean horror. The man cries more than a Disney princess and yet still somehow manages to give major “emotionally unavailable dad” energy.
And let’s not forget Jeong Yeong-sook as Grandma, who turns every scene into a masterclass in menacing old-lady energy. If she’d survived, she could’ve easily spun off into her own horror franchise: Grandma: The Reckoning.
Themes: Isolation, Guilt, and Too Many Ghosts in One House
Loner is not your typical horror film where a vengeful spirit kills teenagers for existing. It’s about the monsters you create when you’re too afraid to face reality. It’s about guilt festering like an open wound. It’s about how family secrets are scarier than any ghost.
But it’s also, in a weird way, a comedy — not because it’s trying to be funny, but because human tragedy this extreme hasto be laughed at, or you’d cry until your eyeballs fall out.
Every creak in the floorboards, every hallucination, every moment of Soo-na’s unraveling is both terrifying and absurd. Watching this movie feels like being locked in a haunted house designed by Sigmund Freud: everyone’s repressed, everyone’s hallucinating, and no one’s getting out emotionally intact.
Cinematography: Gloom Never Looked So Good
Visually, Loner is a bleak masterpiece. Every frame is soaked in shadow and despair, like the cinematographer dunked the camera in depression before shooting. The house feels alive — and not in a comforting way. The lighting is so muted that half the time you’re not sure whether you’re watching a ghost or just a patch of mold.
And yet, it works. You feel the claustrophobia, the suffocating silence, the sense that every corner of the house hides both a corpse and a terrible memory. It’s psychological horror disguised as a domestic tragedy.
Final Thoughts: Misery Has Never Been So Compelling
Loner is one of those rare horror films that manages to make you feel both haunted and heartbroken. It’s not just about ghosts — it’s about the ghost of guilt, the specter of family dysfunction, and the horrifying realization that sometimes you don’t need the supernatural to be damned.
It’s beautifully shot, painfully acted, and leaves you wondering whether you should call your therapist or your exorcist first.
So yes — Loner is grim, disturbing, and more depressing than a funeral in the rain. But it’s also one of the smartest and most emotionally devastating horror films to come out of South Korea.
Grade: A (for “Agoraphobia, Angst, and Absolute Mastery”)
If you like your horror with substance, emotion, and a side of vermin, Loner is the film for you. Just don’t watch it while home alone — or worse, with your family. Because after this, you’ll start questioning both your sanity and your genealogy.
