Thormod, one of my students, posted a cryptic link to this in his blog, writing nothing but “I think Jill will like this”. He’s quite right. I do.

What is it? It’s The Uninvited. What’s that? Hang on, I think you’ll enjoy it more if you look at it before you read about what it is. Go on. Choose truth, then look at loss, memory, belief before going for the more factual parts. I almost cried at loss, primed by the theme of mothers and lost children, I was swayed by the repetitive music, the words spoken in a foreign language and the visually delightful subtitles, by the simple interactivity. Such a simple technique: a woman’s silhouette, pacing in a browser window, following your cursor. When you click (as words attached to your cursor beg you to do) a new, smaller window appears. You click again, and the window shrinks, and keeps shrinking, till the woman begs you to get her out of there, but there’s nothing you can do but keep clicking or abandon her and the site and so you click until she’s on her knees frantic because the window is too small for her to stand in and then she disappears.

You want facts? OK: it’s the Flash promotion site of a Korean film called The Uninvited, by B.O.M.film. The film only has a very minimal listing in the IMDB, and there’s not much information about it in English. Apparently it’s depressing. The film is about a man who sees the ghosts of dead children at his dining room table, and a young woman whose child was killed and whose narcolepsy causes her to falls asleep at odd moments. The website is partially factual and elegantly informational. These are not the best bits of the site. The promotion site won an award at Flashforward 2004, which coincidentally has links to lots of other interesting-looking Flash projects.