If there’s one thing I’m always willing to concede, it’s that South Korean horror cinema is more daring and evocative than what we regularly get here in the States. Kim Soo-jin’s directorial debut, Noise, making its North American premiere at this year’s Fantasia Festival, fits the bill. This is bold, kitchen sink genre filmmaking, and Lee Je-hui’s brazen, go-for-it script is often surprising. Yet, while the aggregate result makes for some intermittently frightening scares, Noise never coheres into something greater than the sum of its parts.
Like the best of them, Noise contextualizes itself within the South Korean housing crisis. It’s familiar territory for Korean horror, like last year’s Fantasia premiere The Tenants, and in its best moments, Noise is a cacophonous symphony of urban terror and societal rot. Ju-hee (Han Soo-a) is on the brink of losing her mind. Installing acoustic-dampening pads, she’s frantically pleading with neighbors to stop making so much noise. Cut to her hearing-impaired sister, Ju-young (Lee Sun-bin), who recently fled the apartment for a factory dormitory. She gets a call from a detective about her sister’s disappearance and returns home to unpack the mystery of her sister all but vanishing in broad daylight.
Wisely, and fitting for the title, Kim Soo-jin frames most of the scares around the uncanny, vaguely hostile noises emanating from within and around the apartment. Neighbors are of little help, too, similarly driven mad by the sounds, and several wedge themselves in as interpersonal obstacles with objectives of their own, most prominently a board member who fears Soo-jin’s stories risk impeding pleas for a state-sponsored renovation.
In the early beats, these pivots from supernatural to very human (and societal) terrors work wonderfully. Tension remains consistent, and the grab-bag of noises, from guttural croaks to grinding teeth and nails, unnerve on a purely sensory level. Ju-young makes for an innately empathetic protagonist, too, even if her hearing impairment is more of a gimmick than anything else, something I wish we’d see less of in the genre as it continues to evolve.
The threat continues to mount, and in a third act that errantly flings itself off the rails, Noise is tasked with reconciling several disparate parts and a revolving cast of characters to its detriment. There are simply too many variables introduced, too many ill-defined threats, to render any of the subsequent scares with any sense of stakes or consequence. The protracted climax delivers on the title in an unfortunate way—after so much intense build, what we’re left with is just noise.
Clever touches keep Noise from being a total wash. There’s too much talent here to dismiss Noise outright, and some gimmicks, including several beats involving speech-to-text software, bring serious scares. A ghost story that’s predominantly driven by sound, well, sounds great, and when Noise leans into its conceit fully, it produces a haunting melody that’s going to rattle and shake. That its climax undoes so much goodwill, leaning harder into visceral, visual scares, is unfortunate, as is its overreliance on tropes we’ve seen one too many times. I’m surprised I didn’t see Kayako Saeki credited at the end, is all I’m saying.
Noise does a lot right until it doesn’t. It won’t drive you to madness, but it won’t inspire anything beyond fine enough, either. Still, it’s a promising debut for filmmaker Kim Soo-jin, and with a little tinkering, I think her next horror film yields the promise to be more of a scream, less of a whisper.
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