Watched all 16 episodes of Korea's The Guest.

Park Il-do, an evil spirit from the East Sea, "visits" a quiet village and possesses a little boy who belongs to a shamanic family. The boy's mother drowns and his grandmother hangs herself. Two priests attempt to exorcise the boy, but the spirit possesses the younger priest instead. The boy's father, believing his son evil, attempts to kill him, but the boy runs away to the younger priest's house, where the younger priest, still possessed by the spirit, murders his own parents and attempts to also murder his younger brother, who is still a little boy. In the meantime a policewoman and her young daughter drive by and stop to talk to the shamanic family's boy, thinking him a victim of child abuse. She knocks on the door of the possessed priest, who then kills her after she rescues his younger brother and enables him to run away. The priest eventually commits suicide.

Flash-forward to 20 years later. The two little boys and the policewoman's daughter are now grown-ups and approximately the same age. The boy who belongs to a shamanic family is now a taxi driver, the priest's younger brother himself a priest and an exorcist, and the policewoman's daughter now a detective. Serendipitously, they meet up to work on a case of possession that they trace to the continued existence of Park Il-do, who, during the course of the entire movie, directs his minions to possess a series of victims. At the same time, the three protagonists work together to resolve the murders that occurred in their families 20 years ago. 

This movie has interesting scenes of Korean shamanic rituals and Catholic exorcism rituals. It is as gripping as _The Possessed_ but, thankfully, not as gory and not as sadistic. The exorcism scenes are credible, and are certainly more convincing than those in The Exorcist, which, to me, had many intellectual and cinematic pretensions. In The Guest there is no levitation, no skin discoloration, no gashes, no rotating heads, no green vomit, no superhuman strength, and no obscenity. It is one of the best movies on exorcism I have ever watched, and is second only to The Rite.

On the downside, the screenplay gives way to an imbalance of performances. It has a lot of ham acting by all of the villains on one hand and deliberate underplaying with limited facial expressions by the good guys on the other. But then again I have yet to see a performer playing a possessed role as though he were acting in a four-act, Chekovian play.

I love the interface between the Catholic, the non-Catholic, and the un-Catholic approaches to possession and exorcism. I nonetheless found Episodes 10 and 14 to be most suspenseful, though, ironically, they contained no scenes of full exorcism. The last episode ties loose ends and should be watched through the end titles.

The problem with movies in series like this is that their writers and directors depend on the creation of cliff-hangers at the end of each episode to keep the audience intrigued. As in the serial novel the problem can never be shaken off, like futile efforts to disguise the heels of humans wearing fish tails in mermaid movies. And, as I find with other series, 16 episodes can be uncomfortably long. Most scenes are simply variations of previous ones, using other characters, other situations, other settings and props, and other special effects. One can push a premise only so far.

So strange, though. All the way from beginning to end the female detective reminded me so much of Bambi Gamban, my former student at De La Salle University; the old priest reminded me so much of Jun Aguilar, a former HR officer at the U.S. Embassy; the assemblywoman reminded me so much of a Facebook Friend in the south; and the assemblywoman's relief driver reminded me so much of a Filipino cardinal.