Rising star Minha Kim unveils her first lead efficiency since breaking out in AppleTV+’s status drama collection Pachinko, enjoying a younger girl accused of murdering a best-selling writer in Chun Sun-young’s characteristic debut A Girl with Closed Eyes. Premiering on the Busan International Film Festival, the yarn unspools as a refined crime thriller bolstered by a raft of sturdy performances, not least from Kim and Choi Hee-seo, however finally let down by some wildly implausible plotting.
Set in South Korea’s provincial mountain area of Hongcheon, A Girl with Closed Eyes opens as a younger girl calling herself Min-ju (Kim) is caught, smoking gun actually in hand, standing over the bloodied corpse of celebrated author Jeong Sang-woo (Lee Ki-woo). Taken in for questioning, she claims that Jeong was answerable for an unsolved kidnapping case from 20 years earlier that serves because the inspiration for his hit novel. She additionally reveals that she is definitely Lee In-seon, the younger woman on the middle of the kidnapping, however will solely clarify additional to her former classmate Park Min-ju (Choi), a detective within the Seoul police division who lately made headlines for blowing the whistle on her superiors.
Park reluctantly returns dwelling for a sit-down along with her estranged good friend, and earlier than lengthy a cavalcade of secrets and techniques, each previous and current, is muddying the waters of their relationship and throwing the whole lot referring to this obvious open-and-shut case out the window. Further including to the confusion, Jeong’s writer is spearheading rising public unrest demanding swift justice for the useless celeb, and Lee’s speedy conviction for his homicide.
A Girl with Closed Eyes wears its quite a few cinematic influences proudly on its sleeve, virtually as a badge of honor. Bong Joon-ho’s Memories of Murder is an apparent touchstone for its central premise of the delicate city cop contending with the extra backward method of small-town regulation enforcement. Jung Byung-gil’s Confession of Murder, during which a serial killer publishes a ebook primarily based on his personal crimes, casts a equally lengthy shadow over Chun’s work. Stephen King’s Misery and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden are additionally enthusiastically name-checked.
Hollywood movies starting from The Silence of the Lambs to The Usual Suspects gamely inform the quite a few interrogation sequences between the central protagonists, whereas Chun confidently ratchets up the stress by protecting quite a lot of seemingly believable outcomes vying for rivalry.
In the second half, nonetheless, the thriller quickly begins to unravel, as a collection of spurious pink herrings is launched, and twist compounds upon twist, undoing a lot of the promising work laid out throughout the movie’s first hour; thus sending it plummeting right into a nosedive of logical incoherence from which it by no means recovers.
While the movie’s decision is due to this fact considerably unsatisfying, A Girl with Closed Eyes is actually not devoid of benefit. Chun directs with an assured hand, staging a collection of slickly crafted set-pieces and stare-downs that may serve stronger materials admirably. Similarly, performances are uniformly glorious.
In Pachinko, Kim performed a resilient, wise-beyond-her-years heroine who’s persistently crushed down by an aggressively patriarchal society — in a job she shares with Academy Award winner Youn Yuh-jung. As In-seon, Kim delivers a multi-faceted flip that shifts effortlessly between nefarious villain and sympathetic sufferer. Choi, whose resumé already contains memorable turns in Okja, Our Body and Deliver us from Evil, greater than earns her stripes because the movie’s de-facto motion hero who proves equal elements Clarice Starling and Frank Serpico in her seek for the reality.
Title: A Girl with Closed Eyes
Festival: Busan (Korean Cinema Today)
Director-Screenwriter: Chun Sun-young
Cast: Minha Kim, Choi Moon Hee-seo, Lee Ki-woo
Sales agent: Finecut
Running time: 1hr 45mins
Content Source: deadline.com