Rising star Minha Kim unveils her first lead performance since breaking out in AppleTV+’s prestige drama series Pachinko, playing a young woman accused of murdering a best-selling author in Chun Sun-young’s feature debut A Girl with Closed Eyes. Premiering at the Busan International Film Festival, the yarn unspools as a polished crime thriller bolstered by a raft of strong performances, not least from Kim and Choi Hee-seo, but ultimately let down by some wildly implausible plotting.
Set in South Korea’s provincial mountain region of Hongcheon, A Girl with Closed Eyes opens as a young woman calling herself Min-ju (Kim) is caught, smoking gun literally in hand, standing over the bloodied corpse of celebrated writer Jeong Sang-woo (Lee Ki-woo). Taken in for questioning, she claims that Jeong was responsible for an unsolved kidnapping case from 20 years earlier that serves as the inspiration for his hit novel. She also reveals that she is actually Lee In-seon, the young girl at the center of the kidnapping, but will only explain further to her former classmate Park Min-ju (Choi), a detective in the Seoul police department who recently made headlines for blowing the whistle on her superiors.
Park reluctantly returns home for a sit-down with her estranged friend, and before long a cavalcade of secrets, both past and present, is muddying the waters of their relationship and throwing everything relating to this apparent open-and-shut case out the window. Further adding to the confusion, Jeong’s publisher is spearheading growing public unrest demanding swift justice for the dead celebrity, and Lee’s speedy conviction for his murder.
A Girl with Closed Eyes wears its numerous cinematic influences proudly on its sleeve, almost as a badge of honor. Bong Joon-ho’s Memories of Murder is an obvious touchstone for its central premise of the sophisticated urban cop contending with the more backward approach of small-town law enforcement. Jung Byung-gil’s Confession of Murder, in which a serial killer publishes a book based on his own crimes, casts a similarly long shadow over Chun’s work. Stephen King’s Misery and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden are also enthusiastically name-checked.
Hollywood films ranging from The Silence of the Lambs to The Usual Suspects gamely inform the numerous interrogation sequences between the central protagonists, while Chun confidently ratchets up the tension by keeping a number of seemingly plausible outcomes vying for contention.
In the second half, however, the mystery soon begins to unravel, as a series of spurious red herrings is introduced, and twist compounds upon twist, undoing much of the promising work laid out during the film’s first hour; thus sending it plummeting into a nosedive of logical incoherence from which it never recovers.
While the film’s resolution is therefore somewhat unsatisfying, A Girl with Closed Eyes is certainly not devoid of merit. Chun directs with an assured hand, staging a series of slickly crafted set-pieces and stare-downs that would serve stronger material admirably. Similarly, performances are uniformly excellent.
In Pachinko, Kim played a resilient, wise-beyond-her-years heroine who is persistently beaten down by an aggressively patriarchal society — in a role she shares with Academy Award winner Youn Yuh-jung. As In-seon, Kim delivers a multi-faceted turn that shifts effortlessly between nefarious villain and sympathetic victim. Choi, whose resumé already includes memorable turns in Okja, Our Body and Deliver us from Evil, more than earns her stripes as the film’s de-facto action hero who proves equal parts Clarice Starling and Frank Serpico in her search for the truth.
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