Vietnam, 1972: When a South Korean reconnaissance unit follows a distress signal from a missing platoon, they are given five days to scout the jungle surrounding an abandoned mansion. The patrol soon realizes that their creepy lodgings are home to evil spirits, and they may be as doomed as the ill-fated platoon that previously disappeared. What could have been a riveting portrayal of wartime trauma from an East Asian POV descends into a by-the-numbers horror entry, where the team gets split up, soldiers get picked off one by one, and dialogue of the “Where’s the lieutenant?”/“I thought he was with you!” variety is oft-repeated. While it’s refreshing to see a war film veer into the supernatural so quietly, R-Point lacks the much-needed dramatic tension to get us through its slow-moving 110 minutes. On the director’s commentary, Kong So-chang jokes that the actors would repeatedly ask him what day of principal photography their one-dimensional characters would get killed off, enabling them to go home. As the saying goes, those who died quickly were the lucky ones.
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