Unable to conceive a child on their own, teacher Mi-sook (Shim Hye-jin) and her husband decide to adopt. Mi-sook takes a liking to Lee Jin-sung (Moon Woo-bin) who demonstrates a precocious artistic ability (his entry in an exhibit of children's artwork is a reproduction of Edvard Munch's painting "The Scream"). When they bring the boy home, he becomes fascinated with a dead Acacia tree in their backyard which he refers to as "mother." When Mi-sook unexpectedly becomes pregnant and gives birth, Lee Jin-sung runs away and never returns. Did his disappearance have to do with the sickly neighbor girl Min-jee (Jung Na-yoon) who claims to be a vampire? And why does the Acacia tree suddenly start to bloom and various characters meet expected mysterious deaths? The film starts out well with a nicely managed set up and deftly handled tensions between the mother and adopted child (the various early troublesome incidents could very well be those of a child finding it difficult to adjust) and his disappearance half-way through is disconcerting but once the supernatural element comes in full force it is all rather perfunctory. The the resolution is quite sad (though not completely unexpected) and it justifies the supernatural happenings but it is unfortunate that the ghostly happenings are so familiar because the film certainly doesn't smack of being a tired genre effort.

Su-hyeon (Min-seo Chae) is a young woman who is dying from leukemia. Her sister Ji-hyeon (Seon Yu), whose vocal chords were damaged in a car accident following her being dumped by her fiance, gifts her with a long wig. Not only Su-hyeon's behavior starts to change when she puts on the wig (as is wont to happen when the wig is made from a dead person's hair) but her leukemia seems to have disappeared and she only suffers attacks when she takes the wig off (such as when Ji-hyeon's friend borrows it and promptly kills her cheating husband and herself). Su-hyeon has also developed a fatal attraction to Ji-hyeon's former fiance that Ji-hyeon discovers may have something to do with wig's deceased donor. THE WIG is a frustrating Asian post-RINGU horror film. It contains all the tropes of that sub-genre (the association of long, flowing hair with madness, mirrors, reflective surfaces or photographs that reveal supernatural activity invisible to the human eye, one-sided cellphone conversations, a greater fear of loneliness than of death) and it has a nicely managed genuinely heart-string-tugging initial set up that leads to a disjointed middle. The convoluted explanation is slapped together in a montage that features not only footage that is recognizable as flashback material as well as shots and dialogue that seem more like they were part of cut scenes as they seem to hark back for emphasis but that doesn't work if the scene wasn't there in the first place (likewise, Ji-hyeon's morose fiancé figures heavily into the latter half of the film but is barely introduced earlier). The explanation would have perhaps been better left out or made less convoluted as some of Su-hyeon's odd and inconsistent behavior would be believable as that of a girl who has been told she's cured but knows inside that she's dying as well as Ji-hyeon's reactions as that of a woman who has been abandoned by her fiancé and is about to lose her sister as well (her muteness isolates her further). Instead, the explanation is thrown in quickly to give us the usual possession/revenge climax that is then followed tragic finale (which also would have worked without the previous forty-minutes or so of nonsense - the latter part of the second act and most of the third act - had the film favored a more restrained approach and the film seems to want to have it both ways with another belabored possibly rational explanation that it too could have done without). As such, the film wastes the excellent lead performances of Min-seo Chae and especially Seon Yu.