“The Hand” Pops Onto DVD at Amazon! Click Here to Purchase.
After a night of heavy drinking, Bong-soo wakes up from a strange nightmare. The nightmare continues when he habitually walks into the bathroom and discovers a grotesque hand sticking up and out of the toilet bowl. The confused yet calm Bong-soo wakes his wife who passes out at the sight after the hand twitches right in front of them. Bong-soo calls 911 to report the strange occurrence and when his residence’s security guard and the dispatched EMTs check out the scene and see his wife passed out on the floor and a supposed severed hand sticking out of the toilet, the unbelievable scenario spirals into suspicion and Bong-soo is detained for suspected gruesome acts of foul play, but when the hand violent moves again and the bathroom door suddenly becomes stuck, those left standing, out of the hand’s deadly reach, are left with only toiletries at their disposal to do battle against the a force their unable to flush.
Preying on one of the more irrational fears that something will slither up the toilet while you make the business, “The Hand” extends that fear with a supernatural startlement. Shot in 2020 but released in 2023, “The Hand,” or “The Hand: Attack of the Things” is to the degree of a ghostly-demonic thriller sprinkled with dry humor from South Korea by writer-director Choi Yun-ho, claustrophobically shot inside an apartment bathroom which, and let’s be being honest, is roomier than most bathrooms in two-story houses. Toilet horror is a subgenre that’s not everyone’s cup of eau de toilette but has resiliently found a niche audience and continues to live quietly in the indie shadows, such as with Evan Jacob’s “Death Toilet” films, Matthew Mark Hunter’s “Killer Poop” franchise, and the Asian market, specifically, has an interest in potty horror-humor, “Zombie Ass: Toilet of the Dead” instantly comes to mind. However, the absurdity of these titles doesn’t infect Choi Yun-ho’s less feces-filled horror, focusing more on the curled, demonically-skinned hand from out of the toilet. “The Hand” is a feature presented by Korea Creative Content Agency and Inoi Media and a production of Spooky House, and R202 studio.
With an intimate setting comes an intimate cast to do battle with the mysteriously unknown monstrous hand. Lee Jae-won is up to the task, or, well, placidly taking in the situation with subtle caution, as the expressionless alcoholic husband Bong-soo. The regular Korean television actor infiltrates into his first leading man feature, or perhaps barely a feature with a film runtime of under 60-minutes, tackling close-quarter dynamics and a computer-generated thing with finger fingers, elongated fingernails, and a reach that turns the already compact bathroom into practically the size of a coat closet. Considering the mention of his drinking problem more than once, Bong-soo’s alcoholism isn’t one of the more centric elements, especially at the chagrin of his wife Joohee (Jeong Seo-ha) to create a dynamic hurdle to arc over. Once the building security guard (Soo-ho Ahn) and 3-person 911 team, with Park Sang-wook portraying lead paramedic, the energy devolves to a humorous suspicion of Bong-soo and the pigeon-hearted presence of the lead paramedic as the two men ever so lightly buttheads in a confounding position and through the progression of the ordeal, the squabbling pair form along the way a bond out of insta-desperation. When the wife finally revives, another breakthrough moment between Bong-soo and his wife becomes realized that they’ll never take each other for granted again as they do slow motion poses and battles with an army of apartment wall-protruding hands who carry a deadly touch. The jagged line graph tone maintains a comedic constant right through the heart of “The Hand” that lets the characters sway freely in various complexions without jarring their principles too flippantly.
The titular hand is a fully operational character in itself. A complete CGI mockup straight from the backstory sewers of Hell, conceived from a threadbare anecdote of a woman found dead in a nearby sewer tunnel with her arm missing a few days prior told by the paramedic leader. That arm, with gnarled hand attached, is thought and assumed to be the same wretched one sticking ominously straight up and out from the toilet bowl. Texturally, the synthetically composited hand looks pretty darn good with barely a trace of smoothed over plastic-splash veneer. These scenes are also intermixed with a rubber hand cast with obvious contrast against the CGI hand. That is until the arm extends feet beyond its chamber pot dwelling to tightly grip unsuspecting prey, like a crocodile lying in wait. When in more a realistic scale, the hand’s movements are tremendously naturally looking with the help of green-suited animator and between appearance and mobility, the captured result, though miniscule in size appropriate for the indie film, has realistic attraction that edges “The Hand” out of the absurdity of circumstances and into more thrilling territory while still focus lit by comedic lighting. The characters themselves are the more farcical models in comparison with representatives often aloof or arrogantly confident with ostentation as terror responses straddling between nonsensical and pragmaticism.
“The Hand” arrives onto DVD home video from Synergetic, presented in a widescreen 1.78:1 aspect ratio on a MPEG2 encoded, standard definition, DVD5. Decoding at a fairly high compression rate of 7 to 8Mbps, image quality has a fair amount of detail and color saturation from off the lesser disc capacity. Facial details can appear soft throughout, sometime blotchy or waxy that fuses the contours and skin without delineation, and the CGI hand, though textured nicely, can have an early day video game blockiness about it in a handful of scenes. The surround locations, such as bathroom and apartment, are hue balanced and display distinct visual variation. The Korean Dolby Digital 2.0 mix is the only audio option available that comes with burned in English subtitles. Dialogue renders over clearly inside the natural digital recording and prominent amongst the rest of the mix, isolating the changing levels of inflections and tones of what the moment calls for. The English subtitles synch consistently with the action, but there are spot grammatical errors. Aside from the play and chapter menu selection on the static menu, there are no selectable bonus features. The after credits contains how the CGI scenes are composited together so stay tuned after the movie. The scroll-like artwork with a monstrous hand, illustrated with a mock age-fading, is really neat visually and well-done. Inside the bendy Amary case is just the disc with the same artwork in concise form. With the region free playback, the Synergetic release runs at 62 minutes and, assumingly, comes unrated, as the rating is not listed on the back cover.
Last Rites: Comedy and horror create stationary white-knuckle tension in “The Hand” despite not reining in a tightfisted backstory on the hand itself which ultimately turns the five fingered paw into more of a marginal footnote.
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