When a reclusive young man dies mysteriously after receiving an email to a webpage about a seaside salt-mining village, just-back-from-suspension detective So-young (Song Yun-ah) and her rookie partner Hyun-ki (Lee Dong-wook) discover that the victim had been institutionalized after killing a man and had been seeing a psychiatrist because of delusions of a woman in black with long hair tormenting him. Also suspicious is the group of his now prominent former friends who all made deposits into the victim's bank account to support his solitary lifestyle. When those men start dying in similar ways (the coroner determines that their heart attacks were caused by a deadly gas that seems to originate from within rather than being ingested), So-young travels to the village and discovers that a supposedly haunted salt storage shack and learns that the man killed by the recluse was the boyfriend of a teenage girl who subsequently disappeared mysteriously and is believed to have committed suicide. With victims dropping one by one, So-young and Hyun-ki race to discover the link between the deaths, the persecuting woman in black, and the missing girl but (for a change) things are really not what they seem... Not really "CSI meets THE GRUDGE" as quoted on the back cover of the DVD, ARANG is an Asian horror flick told from the perspective of the detectives rather than the potential victims. That said, while the mystery element is more diverting than in other Asian horror flicks, the scare element is much more routine and decidedly unscary (usual long-haired ghost appearing over shoulders, in mirrors, in small spaces, as well as a ghost child too). The twists thrown in around the perfunctory "find the hidden corpse" are surprising for a horror flick but a bit contrived for the thriller genre and just as we're about to accept the film and its obligatory surprise ending denouement on their own terms and forget about asking what "arang" means, up pops a text screen. The subtitles translate the heading as "The Legend of Arang" but then does not bother to translate the legend itself before rolling the end credits. As such, ARANG is stuck somewhere between being a change of pace and more of the same.