Many thanks to Ara Shin of Finecut Co., Ltd. (“Finecut”) for providing streaming links for The Woman (2025), Fragment (2025), and Noise (2024), screening at the 29th edition of the Fantasia International Film Festival (“Fantasia”). Finecut defines itself as “a film company specialized in international sales and marketing, production, financing and acquisition of high-end films, set up in 2008 by Youngjoo Suh, the founder of Cineclick Asia, who has represented many works of the best known Korean filmmakers such as Lee Chang-dong (Poetry), Kim Ki-duk (Pieta), Hong Sangsoo (The Day After), Park Chan-wook (Old Boy), Bong Joon-ho (The Host), Kim Jee-woon (The Age Of Shadows), and Na Hong Jin (The Wailing).”
Finecut’s association with Fantasia is noteworthy in that it exemplifies the diversity of Fantasia’s programming, which embraces several genres past the expected horror and sci-fi entries. Each of these three Korean films eschew monsters and special effects in favor of nuanced psychological character studies of individuals battling the ghosts (i.e., the consequences) of familial traumas. They each satisfy on deep levels.
As a Fantasia World Premiere, The Woman (2025) directed by Hwang Wook, exhibits high marks on two main fronts: directorial range and calibrated acting. It draws focus onto the directorial dexterity of Hwang Wook whose previous feature Mash Ville (2024), an acclaimed World Premiere at last year’s Fantasia, was a “hysterical, award-winning neo-Western black comedy.” The Woman departs from Mash Ville’s frenetic hilarity to offer a completely different mode of genre: a character-driven psychological thriller set at a brooding pace. This affords the opportunity for Han Hye-ji to deliver a knockout performance as Sun-kyung, an unmoored and otherwise unremarkable young woman who inadvertently answers an ad for a secondhand appliance offered by Young-hwan, a fidgety fellow who becomes increasingly unhinged and begins to stalk her. Not only that, but she becomes convinced that Young-hwan is behind a classmate’s suspicious suicide. In setting out to prove her suspicions, Sun-kyung implicates herself into a sinister cat-and-mouse chase. Her burgeoning awareness that she is in danger viscerally comprises the film’s first half, ramping up tension and engendering suspense.
It's unfortunate, then, that the film’s second half branches off into narrative tangents that dilute the tension Hwang Wook had effectively achieved in the film’s first half, introducing a thick net of disorienting episodes that seem to invalidate each other as the narrative unfolds. Han Hye-ji’s performance remains consistent and engaging, however, offsetting the unexpected obfuscations, and there’s enough style to Wook’s direction to maintain interest, even if this reviewer found himself scratching his head and wondering if he'd missed something. My final sense was that the nature of Sun-kyung’s rootlessness had to do with a disconcerting tendency she had to attract danger to herself and involve others, while presenting the urgent necessity to escape. As a woman, that’s the woman she is. At its best, The Woman encourages audiences to keep their eye on a director who is learning his chops as he ranges over genres, and an actress whose mastered chops are in full display.
Child-in-peril narratives are nearly a genre in themselves, if not a subgenre of coming-of-age stories. The monster in Fragment doesn’t have fangs or claws, he’s simply an immoral and black-hearted father sentenced to prison for murder, leaving behind a guilt-ridden son Jun-gang (Oh Ja-hun) to take care of his little sister without money to pay bills or rent. Feeling he has brought their suffering onto himself for having reported his father to the authorities, Jun-gang struggles with trying to return their lives to normalcy. But how can he? The man and woman his father murdered lived (and died) in their neighborhood and their surviving son Gi-su (Moon Seong-hyun) lives alone in his parents’ apartment not that far away from where Jun-gang and his sister are being threatened with eviction. Their lives are inextricably intertwined by circumstantial proximity and shared feelings of guilt and helplessness. As Gi-su becomes aware that the offspring of his parents’ murderer live nearby, he wrestles with wanting to enact vengeance, to inflict harm on them, and on himself. It’s a painful, vicious cycle to witness inflicted on innocent children and director Kim Sung-yoon successfully elicits compassionate performances out of each and every member of the cast, but especially by the three young leads whose course towards redemption is overwhelmingly heartbreaking. I thought about this movie for days afterwards.
Ever since Val Lewton introduced the jump scare in Cat People (1942) through hissing air brakes at a bus stop, sound has been used to jangle nerves, fry the mind, and raise the hair on necks. This strategy has been brilliantly effected through Park Yong-ki’s eerie sound design, laminated onto the narrative premise of a young woman with a hearing impediment experiencing mysterious noises throughout her missing sister’s apartment.
Horror thriller genre is at its best when it reflects social anxieties and Panos Kotzathanasis of Asian Movie Pulse has best determined what anxiety is in force here. “The Korean concept of ‘floor noise’ refers to inter-floor noise, particularly sounds transmitted from upstairs neighbors to downstairs residents in multi-story apartment buildings. It is a major social issue in South Korea, tied to the country’s high-density housing and cultural sensitivity to intense sounds. Because many Korean apartments use hard flooring (not carpets) and concrete slabs that do not fully absorb impact sound, even regular household activities can be heard clearly. The Korean Environment Corporation (KECO) and government bodies receive tens of thousands of complaints annually. Although mediation centers have been established, enforcement remains limited. Kim Soo-jin, in her feature debut, takes this concept as her foundation, adds the element of hearing impairment that recalls Midnight, and delivers a thriller/horror that frequently ventures into J-horror territory.”
His mention of J-horror is what initially drew me to Noise and what most satisfied me about the film: dread. Give me jump starts, give me dread, and I’m all in.
