Why would anyone go camping, ever, for supposed ‘pleasure’? It seems to be a lesson lost on South Koreans, too, if we can judge at least a little bit based on The Human Trap (2021). However, the camping aspect of the film is only a minor aspect of what the plot eventually has in store; what a shame, then, that we spend a good hour hanging around the tents before anything actually happens. It’s a film by turns spirit-level flat and incredibly garbled, restricted by the double-whammy of poor writing and reduced finances and unable to truly land its wait-and-you’ll-find-them, more intriguing aspects.
Here’s how it all starts: after a round of speed dating (speed dating, unbeknownst to the young man on the date) we end up, quite spontaneously, heading off on a camping trip (and how? His phone rings, he agrees to go when a friend asks him and, when she hears, his date Ji-ae apparently wants to go, too). We can begrudge some respect to him, by the way, for only agreeing to all this as he thinks he’s on a promise; his other motivation, that boys need to take girls with them or else camping is suspiciously gay, is more of a puzzler perhaps, but regardless, before too long we’re with a bunch of Characters, waiting for a lift into the woods because their car has broken down on the outskirts. Alongside the manager of the campsite, they head off, with no one really perturbed by the manager’s phone conversations with someone already up there with a gun to ‘shoot boar’; the audience, meanwhile, get some glimpses of what looks like a semi-feral chap padding about amongst the trees.
Forget about him for a while, though: aside from popping in on them to steal a bit of food, he doesn’t figure prominently, not at the moment. Instead, we get a hell of a lot of settling in, character development and verisimilitude about the whole camping experience, though interestingly, phone reception at the site seems highly reliable (all the phones go missing shortly after this bombshell, though, so it’s of little comfort then.) Here’s something else odd: despite fairly quickly working out that a succession of other young people may have been at the campsite before them, shedding photos, phones and jewellery as they passed through, no one seems in a particular rush to do anything about it. Now, The Human Trap (or The Trap, as it was previously known before someone thought to make things a little more overt) certainly doesn’t have much budget to play around with, and given that a lot of the Korean cinema which has reached the West has tended to be rather stylish and swish, it certainly looks different to your Park Chan-wooks and similar – but of course, Korea has a low-budget indie cinema scene just like anywhere else. Fine, though you soon start to manage your expectations in terms of what you’re actually going to see done here: there sadly isn’t some grand denouement, or some gory explosion that they’re saving everything for.
The real issue, though, is in the film’s writing and as such, its pace. Earnest, if amateurish performances can’t mask the fact that almost nothing happens until nearly the hour mark, and then a couple of film’s worth of plot gets hastily thrown in. Given that the end credits roll at 1:21, you can only imagine what that means for the film’s overall shape, development and exposition. Endless chatter pads out the film for its first two thirds, but that chatter is usually dull and undistinguished, so that even when the film begins to reframe and reconsider key scenes from different perspectives later, backfilling some aspects of the plot, it’s too late to properly build a sense of threat or some consistent idea. I’m not entirely sure that the promotional blurb for The Human Trap which claims that it is ‘in the tradition of The Evil Dead and The Cabin in the Woods‘ does anything other than set it up for a fall, either, given that it bears no resemblance to either of those films, beyond having trees in. (The blurb also omits to mention a key plot element, instead making mention of one the film’s Christian characters: this could be to avoid spoilers, but also, it suggests that Christianity will be important as a theme here, and – no such consideration from this hack – it’s not really, not with everything else going on.)
You can pick out some quite interesting subtext to this film which marks it out as belonging to a non-Western tradition, even if you can quibble on the use made of Christianity; gender and sexuality would be one aspect (poor Chae-rim is consistently characterised as being physically unattractive compared to Ji-ae, which is perplexing) but the main takeaway is in the theme of the ferocious financial issues which so often beset ordinary Koreans (the same issue which propelled the storyline of the wildly-popular Squid Game a few years ago – 2021, actually). Speaking of which, The Human Trap is a 2021 film which has likely languished somewhere for a few years before being picked up for release but, well. I don’t know what’s happened to the past few years either. It’s just a shame that a film which clearly does have ideas has distributed them so unevenly across its modest runtime, that its potential for some effective drama and scares get lost in the mix. Only go in for this one if you are of a forgiving, patient temperament.
The Human Trap (2021) is now available on Amazon Prime.