What is a genre festival without a meta-narrative (or two) exploring the tortuous connection between the art and the artist? This year’s first SXSW London filled this gap with Kimbo Kim’s Korean thriller Forte. When the naive and hopeful young composer Yeonji (Leem Chae-young) is invited to be part of the team working on a film score by a highly acclaimed studio, she ignores the rumours that surround the prestigious Forte Studio.
However, not long after her arrival, a fellow composer suffers a strange affliction, and the isolated studio no longer feels like a romantic escape. Its surrounding silence is no longer serene but damning and the lurking security guard no longer feels like a safety measure but an omnipresent threat. But Yeonji is so entranced by her own aspiration and determined to finish her score, she remains in the studio’s strange grasp.
Forte is often so concerned with creating unsettling ambience that it forgets to add context. So little is offered about the film the studio is scoring or the director attached, that it doesn’t add to an aura but works to detract any possible menace. Yeonji’s enchantment with her project and the other staff’s oddness is insisted upon, despite a lack of context as to how she has been bewitched other than a few bland notes and even fewer conversations going beyond regular colleague cordiality.
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Kimbo Kim relies on the Korean forests themselves, wafting cultish tropes into the backdrop and failing to place much in the foreground. Mist alone cannot muster mystery. When Forte does move on from the forest, the imagery offered is unique, particularly the maniacally cackling mud-covered man who taunts the screen. However, the figure’s connections to the studio are never linked, making him just a great demonic spare note in an empty symphony.
There are moments where Forte is aware of the cliched line it walks, mocking its own return to the tortured artist trope, and yet it never manages to go beyond it. When Yeonji finally confronts the head composer, she damns the score they’ve been working on for the film’s entire runtime, calling it “monotonous”, and by proxy offers a meta dig at Forte’s score up until this moment. It is here that Forte ups the ante, matching Yeonji’s insistence on intensity, as her final composition demonstrates.
Although Forte promises to tackle ageism and misogyny in the industry, it isn’t until this final act that Forte remembers its themes. But of course, without a build, the crescendo lands on deaf ears. There have been no misogynistic microaggressions for Yeonji to endure until she is suddenly forced to defend herself from the suddenly leering director, who had remained out of frame for the majority of the film’s runtime. So while the final chapter is a surprisingly nasty one, the shock comes more from an inconsistent script than from its violent finale. Forte is a film so determined to create an air of beguiling mystique that it forgets to lay the foundations, ultimately plateauing when it should reach its peak.
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