Bestseller is a 2010 Korean movie. Here's your story: Popular writer gets accused of plagiarizing her latest novel. She retreats with her young daughter to a small town to begin resurrecting her career and working on her next book. Increasingly frustrated, and with a bad case of writer's block, she becomes obsessed with finding her literary inspiration by any means necessary. She soon finds what she's looking for, but it's way more than she bargained for.
SPOILERS AHEAD!
From there, this movie plays out as part ghost story, part murder mystery, part psychological drama, part action crime thriller. That's a lot of parts for one film!!!...This movie could have easily gotten by with just one or two of these story parts that are typical of this genre, and it probably would have been a much better film if so. But, that's not the case, and this flick is what it is!
Did I like it?...Well, Kinda!...but, I can't make up my mind, and have several varying opinions of what I thought of it overall:
On the one hand, it does seem to be a movie that ran out of steam halfway through, and ended up haphazardly slamming 2 separate one hour stories together in order to get to the finish line. This is the simplest and most likely explanation. These 2 stories are actually intertwined well enough, but the differing tones and themes of each story just don't seem to mesh together very well as a whole.
On the other hand, when I saw this film a second time, I couldn't help but think this story was primarily intended to be interpreted as somewhat of a 3 act play based around the life of the heroine. It's interesting to look at this film this way, but even in doing so, it's still not quite right.
On the third hand (Yes, I have 3 hands!), this movie is not all that different than an anthology type film that tells 3 or 4 horror/mystery/thriller stories that are usually somewhat loosely woven together. The exception here being that it's the same characters continuing the same story along a differing path as the movie progresses. Hmmmm. This movie works well from this point of view, but it's still a little bit off!
Aside from the disjointed way this story unfolded, there's not too much else to complain about; Overall production was quite solid, acting by entire cast was sufficient, and the lead actress was quite effective throughout.
So, make of this film what you will. I thought it was entertaining enough to give it a watch, but I can't wholeheartedly recommend it in all honesty, because it doesn't quite hit the mark no matter how you look at it. None of my 3 hands can give it a definite thumbs up!
I think it's current IMDb rating of 6.3 is pretty much "spot on"!...I'd really like to give it a rating of 7, but I just can't bring myself to do it, so 6 out of 10 stars it is!
