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This mainstream Korean melodrama, based on a popular 2016 Chinese film, was reportedly completed before the pandemic and didn’t receive a proper release in Korea until last year. It chronicles the decades-long relationship between two women starting in adolescence, when the constitutionally dour Mi-so (Kim Da-mi) moves to Jeju Island with her single, fitfully employed mother. Despite their obvious differences in temperament, she makes friends with the relatively emotionally stable Hae-un (Jeon So-nee), and they become BFFs. Mi-so soon has to work to support herself after her mother takes off again, though she’s still in school, but director Min Yong-geun and co-writer Kang Hyun-joo indicate her self-destructive romanticism more with cultural signifiers, such as her lifelong obsession with Janis Joplin. As Hae-un is being groomed by her parents to get into a decent university and become a school teacher, Mi-so cultivates the kind of resentments that only an intense platonic love can engender, and the script exploits these differences to flesh out a psychological mystery that’s too ambitious for its own good.

Over the ensuing years, the setting moves to Seoul, where both women eventually end up, though not at the same time, and there are long passages in their lives when they are not in touch at all. At different points they share or trade off a boy (Byeon Woo-seok) of no real consequence and at some stage virtually switch places in terms of the way they approach the world as they reboot their lives following college, marriage, and giving birth, with Hae-un breaking free of her staid outlook and Mi-so gaining some kind of stability. But this swapping of fortunes is misleading in that it feels like cheating on the part of the filmmakers, who keep teasing the viewer with an unreliable narrator and odd little discrepancies that don’t make immediate sense but add up to something startling if not particularly plausible or, for that matter, affecting. 

The script doesn’t really matter that much, because what Soulmate has to sell is a relationship that transcends the overt cleverness of the plot. The two principal actors credibly grow into their characters as the movie progresses, but, more significantly, their chemistry as antagonistic forces covers a wide range of emotional territory without losing sight of the basic personalities that make those respective characters distinctive. There were stretches where I thought they would either destroy each other or become lovers in a true physical sense, with either possibility providing a more trenchant development of the relationship than what the movie actually does. True soulmates offer those kinds of possibilities.

In Korean. Opens Feb. 23 in Tokyo at Marunouchi Piccadilly (050-6875-0075), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011).

Soulmate home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2023 Climax Studio Inc. & Studio&New

The thing about Korean historical dramas is that they tend to go over the same dozen stories. Ahn Tae-jin’s hit, The Night Owl, is based on the one about the 17th century Joseon crown prince, Sohyeon (Kim Sung-cheol), who was poisoned shortly after returning from eight years as a hostage to China’s relatively new Qing dynasty. Korean history freaks will likely parse the mystery at the center of Ahn’s version of the story without much trouble, but the rest of us first have to contend with customs and protocols of the time that the freaks just take for granted, such as the role of concubines in the matter of succession, the tension between royals and bureaucrats, and the ever-present dominance of China—or, for that matter, any foreign influence. Without a grounding in these matters, the viewer may have a tough time working out the logic of the central mystery, which is more complicated than just, Who poisoned the prince?

Ahn’s fictional twist to the tale is Chun Kyung-soo (Ryu Jun-yeol), a young blind man who has the cohones to aspire to become a royal acupuncturist, an art we learn was still rare in Joseon at the time. In fact, the opening scenes involve a kind of test as to whether the medical staff of the palace will take on its first bona fide acupuncturist. As a blind man, Chun can’t hope to compete and thus acts boldly when he passes the diagnostic review through deduction, without even coming into contact with the patient. He then is taken on as a factotum in the royal infirmary, tasked with counting inventory and sweeping up because of his handicap. However, what no one knows is that Chun can actually see, but only at night when there is no artifical light, an attribute he exploits to work his way into the good graces of the palace after being selected to treat one of the king’s concubines because he is blind—and then successfully curing her of her ailment. However, after the crown prince returns from abroad and Chun is called upon to treat both him and his father, he realizes that his qualified disability could actually get him killed, since it allows him to drift into close proximity of the scheme to kill the crown prince. He has to hide the letters he sends to his sick younger brother in the provinces lest his betters realize he can see under certain circumstances, and thus knows more than he should. As Chun says at one point, “Humble people have to pretend that they don’t know anything to survive, and thus it’s better if they just can’t see.”

By necessity, much of the movie takes place at night, and Tae shoots many of the numerous action scenes in the shadows. Similarly, there is only the dimmest distinction between the good guys and the bad guys. Chun, of course, by dint of his loyalty not only to his sick brother but also to the crown prince, whose virtue is signalled by his love for the very young son he hasn’t seen since infancy, comes across as a beleagured saint, and his own heroics, not to mention his unique survival skills, make him an unusual kind of romantic protagonist. In that way, Tae brings something fresh to these worn historical cliches. 

In Korean and Chinese. Now playing in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670), Yebisu Garden Cinema (0570-783-715). 

The Night Owl home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2022 Next Entertainment World & C-JES Entertainment & Cinema Dam Dam

Since I’m not a gamer I don’t have anything useful to say about whether this feature film is anything like the popular and reportedly very violent video game it’s based on, but the plot is such a mash-up of conflicting vectors that I imagine the filmmakers had a difficult time trying to make narrative sense of game elements that are just there for the sake of excitement. How old, exactly, is this game? Because it’s obvious that whoever came up with it never thought it might be made into a movie.

The premise is that a night security guard at a long-closed pizza parlor is beset by a bunch of life-sized, possessed animatronic figures that used to be the main draw of the place for families. In the opening scene we see one of these guards trying to escape the darkened restaurant through air conditioning ducts, being pursued by something we can’t see, until he’s dispatched. The fact that director Emma Tammi doesn’t include a money shot of the guard’s obliteration would seem to incidate she’s saving the goodies for later, but it’s a tease whose implication she never fulfills because the script gets in the way. We get plenty of backstory about the next security guard, Mike (Josh Hutscherson), a good-hearted, orphaned loser who is trying to protect his little sister, Abby (Piper Rubio), in the face of a custody battle from his evil aunt (Mary Stuart Masterson). He takes the job against his better judgment because unemployment means the aunt will win, but the job counselor (Matthew Lillard) who throws him the gig is pretty clear that it sucks: “Pay’s not great and the hours are worse.” Compounding Mike’s fiscal insolvency is his battered psychological state: He suffers nightmares about the abduction of his little brother when Mike was a teenager, as well as followup dreams featuring other abducted children who might know what happened to the brother. All of these elements, as well as the aunt’s schemes to make Mike look as irresponsible as possible, are meant to come together in such a way as to explain the mysterious goings-on at Freddy’s in the middle of the night, which is over-determined for a movie premised on a video game where the only point of interest is whether the player can survive a bunch of big bloodthirsty dolls. I had questions about plot holes throughout the film’s 110 minutes, but once the climax came into view I just gave up.

And for all that the visceral aspects were weak meat. I counted three instances where the basic concept of the game is in operation, and none were particularly suspenseful or scary; which would seem to mean the movie is aimed at a younger cohort. The people who play the game are probably looking forward to seeing the gore recreated with more graphic verisimilitude, but what they get is a supernatural melodrama with a few limp jump scares. Where’s the gross-out fun in that?

Opens Feb. 9 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Shibuya Humax Cinema (03-3462-2539), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

Five Nights at Freddy’s home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2023 Universal Pictures

When horror movies could no longer top themselves in terms of gross-out imagery and the split-second timing of jump scares, filmmakers had to think of newer ways to frighten us. As one solution, they’ve mostly replaced the visceral with the suggestive, and this Italian low-budget feature, directed by three horror buffs who go by the collective moniker T3, hits on pure sound as a means of getting its creep on. In that regard, it has to work overtime to make any kind of impression compared to A Quiet Place, which it very much resembles in terms of concept, though the sound design by itself is more inventive.

A wannabe singer named Emma (Penelope Sangiorgi)—according to her boyfriend, Seba (Rocco Marazzita), “the next Ariana Grande”—is summoned home to Italy from New York after her parents are involved in an accident. When she arrives she learns that her father (Peter Stephen Wolmarans) is in the ICU after being pushed down the stairs by her mother (Sandra Pizzullo), who is also hospitalized for observation. The doctor suspects that the mother was defending herself during a domestic violence dispute, and she admits to her daughter that her father did attack her, “but it wasn’t him.” Emma and Seba repair to the family home by themselves where the former finds an odd antique radio in her father’s amateur sound studio—the place where she learned how to sing. Left alone while Seba goes out to pick up food, she turns on the radio and hears odd voices that often increase in volume suddenly, and when that happens…

T3 don’t pursue the usual suspense cycles that characterize modern horror. Instead, they use shadows and dim, fleeting peripheral images to intensify their unsettling sound effects, and as the movie progresses the viewer learns the logic behind the scares and what they represent. The mystery at the heart of the movie isn’t original enough to make up for the bad acting, but the unease created as it unfolds has a cumulative power that’s eventually squandered by a pat climax, which turns out to be not even a climax, because there is a ten-minute coda where it appears the directors want to recreate the same horror concept in a visual context, perhaps for their next movie? Can’t say it was intriguing enough that I would look forward to it.

In English and Italian. Now playing in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551), Shinjuku Cinema Qualite (03-3352-5645).

Sound of Silence home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2022 T3 Directors SRL