Synopsis
The Closing Film of the 15th Puchon International Fantastic Film Festival is the Korean thriller Blind. The film comes at a time when the genre exploration has taken place in the Korean film industry in the last few years and led to demands that moviemakers reach deeper and further for their subject matter. Selected as the Most Popular Project in the ‘2009 Hit By Pitch’ held by the Producers Guild of Korea and regarded as one of the hottest projects in the industry, Blind is worthy of attention as it represents a novel approach to the thriller genre. In the film, as cases of missing female college students continue to pile in, a woman reports witnessing a hit-and-run. The witness turns out to be a visually impaired woman played by KIM Ha-Neul, whose testimony the police is reluctant to believe at first, but eventually trusts as the woman displays her acute senses other than her sight. Then one day a second witness Gi-seop played by YOO Seung-Ho comes on the scene, but he is unable to corroborate the woman’s testimony. As the case develops, they find that the victim of the hit-and-run case is one of the missing college girls and the puzzling chase of the serial killer begins. Who is telling the truth?
Blind is reminiscent of the classic thriller Wait Until Dark(1967) in which Audrey Hepburn played a blind woman. In the film, creating the suspense hangs on amplifying the tension in situations where sight cannot play any role. The woman drills to the core of the case just by sensing the sounds and their directions, smelling the scents, and remembering the feeling of the wisp of wind that brushed her ears when the window opened. KIM Ha-Neul who has been expanding her scope appearing in comedy, romance and even horror films is quite believable as a blind person. The combination of KIM and YOO Seung-Ho who is one of the rising stars comes from an accurate assessment of the demands of Korean popular culture. Adding trendy pop culture elements to the frame of a classic thriller, Blind is also meaningful in that it shows the present situation of Korean genre movies.