The Cat is a 2011 South Korean horror film directed by Byun Seung-wook. The film is about So-yeon, who works at a small pet-grooming shop called Kitty N Puppy. So-yeon has claustrophobia and starts having apparitions of a ghostly young girl with cat-like eyes.
Plot
So-yeon works as a groomer in a pet shop, but has claustrophobia due to childhood trauma. A woman comes to the pet shop to collect her Persian cat, Bidanyi. The next day, the woman is found dead in an elevator, but Bidanyi is unharmed. The police are unable to determine the cause of her death. So-yeon's friend Kim Jun-seok, one of the police officers investigating the murder, gives her Bidanyi to look after. So-yeon starts to have nightmares of a young girl with cat-like eyes and is haunted by hallucinations. Jun-seok and his fellow officers watch CCTV footage of the woman who died and it's concluded that she died of a panic attack. So-yeon's friend Bo-hee, who recently adopted a cat, is killed in her closet by the cat-eyed girl. That night, So-yeon cuts her finger while preparing food for Bidanyi. Bidanyi licks the blood and becomes aggressive. The next day, she takes Bidanyi to the dead woman's husband, but he does not want him. He explains that his wife claimed to be haunted by a strange little girl. Disturbed, So-yeon leaves Bidanyi in a park. At the animal shelter, a staff member cremates a dead cat, but is pulled inside the furnace and burns to death. Jun-seok and So-yeon go to the animal shelter, where they find dead cats and the charred remains of the staff member. They learn that some time ago, there was an infestation of stray cats in the boiler room of an apartment complex. The doors and windows were cemented shut and the cats were left to suffocate. Two weeks later, workers removed the dead cats. So-yeon remarks the similarity of the murder victims all being found dead in a small space. She is again approached by an confused old woman she had encountered before, who is looking for her granddaughter. Jun-seok discovers that the old woman reported her missing granddaughter nine months ago, but her son closed the case. So-yeon escorts the woman back to her apartment - in the same complex where the stray cats lived in the boiler room - and Jun-seok gives her a photo of the granddaughter, who looks exactly like the cat-eyed girl. So-yeon sees the old woman's son beating his mother; he is then killed by a horde of cats. So-yeon goes to the complex's boiler room and is confronted by cats. So-yeon falls into a large canister. The cat-eyed girl appears and shows her how she died; she had played with the cats in the boiler room, and upon hearing of the plans to kill them, she attempted to hide them in the canister. While climbing out, she fell and was paralysed, dying with the cats after the door and windows were cemented. Having conquered her claustrophobia, So-yeon visits her father in a mental hospital, riding in an elevator for the first time without panicking. As she leaves, she and Ju-seok find a kitten underneath their car, and she kindly beckons toward it.
On its opening week, it grossed in South Korea, placing it at second place on the weekend box office chart. It grossed a total of in South Korea and in the foreign markets.
Critical reception
Film Business Asia gave the film a 5/10 review, saying it is "almost a paint-by-numbers example of a classic Korean horror...The Cat is a watchable curio and no more."
