Muristek
Midnight review – deaf heroine brings a new element to super-tense Korean thriller
Kwon Oh-Seung’s impressive debut cleverly uses social sexism to ramp up disbelief in his female characters
This twisty-turny thriller from South Korea is an impressive, auspicious debut for writer-director Kwon Oh-Seung; taut as a piano-wire garotte, it’s compelling as a genre exercise. But it also offers a (possibly accidental) critique of a culture that often treats women and disabled people as inferior to able-bodied men. That latter point is extremely well illustrated late in Midnight when heroine Kyung Mi (Jin Ki-joo), a young deaf woman, keeps trying to get help from the cops or onlookers in a crowded street only to find people usually inclined to believe her pursuer, serial killer Do Shik (Wi Ha-Joon, best known as the handsome cop from Squid Game, magnificent here as a baddie) because he’s such a good actor, skilled at implying she’s “hysterical” or “damaged”.
Unlucky Kyung Mi just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when she interrupted Do Shik while he was in the process of attacking another young woman, So Jung (Kim Hye-Yoon), whose incredibly controlling brother Tak So (Park Hoon) warned her not to stay out too late. Annoyingly, it turns out he was sort of right.
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